Review: Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story

Zuleika Dobson, or, an Oxford love story by Max Beerbohm
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

DNF at 52%.

Not because it was badly done. The prose is perhaps a little bit too clever, but it's resonant and accomplished, and not as needlessly wordy as a lot of classic fiction.

No, I stopped reading because I came for a comic novel, and it turned into a tragic novel that was still trying, intermittently, to be funny.

My read on it is that this started out as a satire of some romance tropes that are still very much with us today. Zuleika, for instance, is one of those women who every man who sees her instantly falls hopelessly in love with, even though she's completely self-centred and self-involved, has no heart whatsoever, no talent in or real dedication to her chosen profession (that of a conjurer), not much in the way of brains (her "library" consists of two books - Bradshaw's railway timetable and the ABC Guide to London), and not even conformity to the classical ideals of beauty.

My own opinion is that the "irresistible woman" is a myth propagated by men who want an excuse not to resist them, but that's another discussion. The best you can say for Zuleika is that she's not a Mary Sue, because far from being good at everything, she isn't good at anything; but that only highlights the fact that there's no actual reason for every man she meets to fall in love with her.

One of the people who does is the Duke of Dorset, an Oxford undergraduate, and another trope: the absurdly eligible bachelor. As well as his main title, he holds several others in the peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and even France; he's extremely wealthy; he's effortlessly talented, keeps his diary in five different languages (Italian when he's at his villa in Italy, French when he's at his place in the Champs Elysees, and depending on his mood, Latin, Sanskrit, Greek - in which he writes verse - and English), and is looked up to by the whole of the university. Even the other men who are in love with Zuleika (which, again, is all of them) acknowledge that he's probably the only one actually worthy of her. He has refused all women up to this point, because he thinks (probably rightly) that they're only after his title, but like everyone else, he can't resist falling in love with Zuleika.

But Zuleika doesn't love him, because she can't love anyone who loves her (or rather, I suspect, because she can't actually love anyone but herself), and this is where the trouble starts.

I'll put this bit in spoiler tags, but I'll mention that if I'd been fully aware of it upfront, I wouldn't have started on the book, and when I became fully aware I stopped reading.

(view spoiler)[The Duke decides, if he can't have Zuleika, he'll kill himself, and because of the high regard he's held in at Oxford - and because people in a mass are sheep, a point the author makes explicitly, and because all the other undergrads are in love with Zuleika too - every single undergraduate at Oxford decides to kill himself as well. What's more, thanks to a traditional omen of the death of a Duke of Dorset being observed, the Duke, against his better judgement, goes through with it, and so do the others.

Now, real young men do have suicidal thoughts when refused by women they imagine they're in love with. It happened to me - though that was far from the only stress I was under at the time, and I would like to point out that I'd known the woman in question for considerably more than the 24 hours that the Duke has known Zuleika, and that I was never in any real danger of going through with it. So this isn't completely satirical. And that's where I think I started to have a problem. Having shown us that Zuleika is heartless and that the young men were foolish, why go all the way through with the tragic outcome? I'm not sure what the author's thought process was, but it took the book out of the realm of comedy for me. Black comedy is not at all to my taste, and I felt like this was ceasing to be comedy at all.
(hide spoiler)]

Interestingly, there are some speculative elements - ghosts, portents, and the like - which are treated completely matter-of-factly. I wonder how much of an influence this novel was on Robertson Davies?

So, a clever book, with some good skewering of tropes that are still (sadly) with us, but ultimately took a direction that lost me as a reader.

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