Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

I finished this mighty tome over a week ago but a number of factors have delayed me posting about it - mostly time, but also the fact that I enjoyed it so much I've been mulling over my exact response ever since.

At the outset I had no idea what to expect from this 1915 novel, the first of Maugham's extensive output I've read, but it is now firmly installed as one of my favourite reads of all time. That sounds rather hyperbolic but few works of fiction have engrossed or affected me as much as this one.

There are several technical reasons why this shouldn't be such a great book. On the surface it's your average bildungsroman (snazzy jargon, eh?), detailing the life of Philip Carey from when he's orphaned at the age of 9 to when he seems to be, surprisingly to himself, happy for the first time at around the age of 30. He lives with his uncle and aunt in Kent; goes to school; studies in Germany; spends a dull year in a London accountancy office; decides he'd rather be an artist and lives a brief but unsatisfactory bohemian life in Paris; moves back to London and uses his inheritance to study to be a doctor; falls in unrequited love with a waitress; and that's halfway through the novel. I'll stop there for fear of spoiling it any further! There are no leaps in time: at 700 pages long, Maugham leisurely describes events in every year of Philip's life. It's apparently a largely autobiographical novel. Philip in no way has an extraordinary life: he's very ordinary. In fact, he's not even really all that likeable; he's a bit of a loner and a snob. The only thing that sets him apart is the fact that he has a club foot (Maugham himself was afflicted with a stammer when he was growing up and transferred the embarassment he felt about that across to Philip's feelings about his foot). The prose style is very flat. There are no great sweeping passages of dazzlingly poetic description, nor an increase in pace as the story unfolds. The story just keeps going, as people's lives do. 95% of the time the novel shows events exclusively from Philip's point of view. The people he meets (many, clearly, as the story takes place over 20 years) are physically described in a very plain, superficial way and you find out about them as Philip does. The novel is also very dated in places.

So why do I think it's so special? Probably because of the very fact that I've seldom come across a story where the ordinary is so emphasised. Of course there are hundreds of great realistic novels with acute psychological perception of characters and events (e.g. Wolf Hall, not to mention classics such as Middlemarch and Anna Karenina). There are also great books that detail a long period of a particular character's life (e.g. David Copperfield). But Of Human Bondage particularly stands out to me because I felt on every page exactly how Philip felt, so good was Maugham at telling his story. The themes of wondering what one should do with one's life; of art versus the real world; of belief and non-belief; these are all themes I'm extremely interested in and all are dealt with in depth by Maugham, organically as we see what happens to Philip year by year, as we see the great highs and lows of an ordinary human life.

And those other characters, so sparingly described by Maugham; we see them in more depth the longer we and Philip get to know them, and that's exactly how it is when we meet and get to know people in real life. Mildred, the subject of Philip's destructive infatuation, is the other character who naturally stands out the most. She's a character that is easy to hate but also magnetically appealing to read about. This is precisely how Philip feels about her.

This is a brilliant book, and though it is dated in places, this even adds to its sense of reality: people did talk and live in the way described within its pages in the 1880s to 1900s. There were times when I was elated by the events occurring to Philip and other times when I felt real despair for him (particularly towards the end as his relationship with Mildred completely unravels and he subsequently suffers a more material loss). Maugham manipulates but in the subtlest of ways. A stand-out chapter for me is when Philip is in Paris and realises that though he has some talent as a painter, he will only ever be mediocre. He then has to decide whether to continue or to try to figure out what to do instead for a living. It's an enormous decision for him and, I think, a great insight into that point in everybody's life when they have to leave old certainties behind and grapple with the realities that life thrusts upon us all.

The only troubling part of the book for me is the last 10 pages. The book ends on a happy note for Philip but to this reader, it seemed somewhat strange that he gave up the dreams he had been striving towards for so long. I won't spoil it by going into detail but I had mixed feelings about the ending. Perhaps Maugham meant the reader to close the book and think that perhaps life can bring us happiness in the most unexpected of ways; that sometimes dreams have to be abandoned to truly be content. I could happily have read another 700 pages about Philip and would really like to know what happened in the next 20 years of his life. Unfortunately for me, Maugham never chose to write that book. So I'll have to be content with this one and I'm sure that I'll re-read it when I'm older. I'm currently at about the same age Philip is at the end of the story so it'll be interesting to see how I react to it in the future.

I'm now reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (I'm quite near the end) and hope to write about it next week.