This veil of tears
I
suppose it counts as serendipity when you’ve been meaning
to read more books by an author after liking one years ago, and
then a trusted source recommends the film of another book, and
then another trusted source gives you a copy of the book…
And so it is with W. Somerset Maugham, whose The Razor’s
Edge I had enjoyed, and whose The Painted Veil (1925)
has recently been in cinemas and even more recently on my reading
pile.
This is a character-driven book - though Maugham
in the introduction says it is the only novel he has written starting
from a story rather than a character - and the central player
is Kitty Fane, unfaithful wife of dull government bacteriologist
Walter (”with his straight, delicate nose, his fine brow
and well-shaped mouth he ought to have been good-looking. But
surprisingly enough he was not”). He is stationed in Hong
Kong and Kitty finds that heat and boredom drive her into the
arms - or thereabouts - of Charles Townsend, Assistant Colonial
Secretary in the colony.
Kitty is described in the blurb as “shallow”
but I had more sympathy for her than that. After all, “within
three months of her marriage she knew that she had made a mistake;
but it had been her mother’s fault even more than hers.”
And the icy portrait Maugham paints of Kittys’ mother, Mrs
Garstin, puts her on a par with the great family villains of literature,
a sort of frustrated Lady Macbeth, “hard, cruel, managing,
ambitious, parsimonious and stupid.” Her intentions for
Kitty are crisp and clear:
It was not a good marriage she aimed at for
her daughter, but a brilliant one. … Still no one whose
position and income were satisfactory asked [Kitty] to marry
him. Mrs Garstin began to grow uneasy. She noticed that Kitty
was beginning to attract men of forty and over. She reminded
her that she would not be any longer so pretty in a year or
two and that young girls were coming out all the time. Mrs Garstin
did not mince words in the domestic circle and she warned her
daughter tartly that she would miss her market. …
Kitty flushed: she knew that her mother did
not care now whom she married so long as somehow she got her
off her hands.
All this goes to prove that a good storyteller can
breach the old rule of show, don’t tell as much as he likes:
besides which, all this is by way of background and if Maugham
gave us these scenes in full detail the book would be four times
the length.
There are several turning points in the story, some
foreseeable and others not, and scenes of breathtaking force,
such as the stretch of chapters 22 to 26, where Walter confronts
Kitty, who then delivers an ultimatum to her lover Charles. Reading
these it is easy to see why a film producer lit up at the prospect:
no actor could fail to do justice to the naturalistic but gripping
exchanges.
The Painted Veil is one of those books
which feels old-fashioned even for its time, yet which satisfies
in more or less every way. It brings to us thoughts not only of
faithfulness but faith in a wider sense, and of the purpose of
life with or without love. All I need to do now is be disappointed
by the film adaptation, and the experience will be complete.
John Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
