middlemarch

Middlemarch by George Eliot

A book I felt defeated by once or twice before, when I began it and couldn’t get past the first 100 pages, always feeling lost and confused and disengaged.  This time I persevered, and it was well worth the effort — but it is, for me at least, an effortful read, with as many uphill sections as downhill passages (which is of course as it should be on a worthwhile long-distance journey).

While I admire the scope and depth of the book, it is not a book I would claim to love, for there is something a little artificial and two-dimensional about the world of Middlemarch and the characters that inhabit it, a Dickensian broadness or lack of subtlety that separates me from them, and makes me constantly aware of the created nature of the world and the will of the author.  What I admired was Eliot’s ability to create complicated and compelling moral situations and dramatize them in a very fluid narrative fashion.  On that level the book is masterfully composed.  I just wish the characters were a little more nuanced, or that  Eliot liked some of them more (Rosamund, Casaboun) and some of them less (Dorothea).  As I read this book I often thought, admirably and somewhat longingly, of Trollope, missing his ability to create shaded, complicated characters, and not settle for what is obvious or easy or to push the reader towards certain conclusions and predispositions.

But there is a great moral current moving through Middlemarch — namely Dorothea’s wish to to live a good, beneficial life that is admirable and compelling, and finally moving.  But I felt the need for it to be undercut or modulated by something bitter or darker or more truthful — a bit more of Mrs. Cadwallader’s acid wit and honest cynicism.