Review: Middlemarch

Middlemarch by George Eliot
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Where to start when reviewing such a classic?

First of all, this is not my usual genre (speculative fiction), though I do venture out of that genre on occasion. I read it mainly because it had been recommended to me as the book you need to read to understand what can be done with the omniscient narrator, and just as an all-round brilliantly written book in general. Secondarily, I was going through a drought of good books, so I pulled this up from the TBR.

Middlemarch is long. It needs to be, because of all it has to cram in: the lives of multiple carefully studied characters, which cross and intersect and create the plot between them, plus a portrait of society as it was at the time it was set (the early 1830s), with observations also relevant to the time when it was written (the early 1870s), and to human life in general. It tackles marriage, the role of women, the eternal British preoccupation with class and station, the living out or otherwise of one's religion, and ethical behaviour versus what is "expected". Perhaps its most wonderful character is Dorothea Brooke (as she is at the beginning of the book), who is both naïve and also authentically devoted to living out her religious principles; the author indicates that in another time and place, she might have been another St Theresa, but that her social context prevented her from greatness and made her merely a person who did great good in ways that were not widely known or celebrated. Because, despite making an idealistic young woman's mistake and suffering for it, she remains a deeply good person and ends up creating what I call the Glorious Ending, in which a character acts kindly and generously where many people would have acted selfishly, and so averts what looks like being inevitable tragedy. But there are several other characters, too, who grow and change through their interaction with each other and with mentors, antagonists, and situations of temptation and opportunity.

The minor characters are beautifully characterized, often through their speech; for example, Dorothea's uncle Mr Brooke, who is determinedly noncommittal about everything and avoids taking any very definite course of action or opinion, or Mrs Cadwallader, the wife of a local clergyman, who is one of those women who speaks her mind on all occasions without caring in the least about anyone else's opinion or feelings. Half a page of their dialogue is enough to show us exactly who they are.

And that brings me to my one issue with the book. As I said, this is not my usual genre, and I usually read fiction written in the last 50 years or so, mostly the last 20, rather than 150 years ago. Accordingly, I'm used to the current style of handling point of view mostly as either tight third person or, less often, first person. In either case, the viewpoint is largely restricted to that of the character; we see what they see, hear what they think, observe what they do and say, and from this decide whether they're reliable, correct, laudable, mistaken, self-deluded, culpable or excusable.

I don't for a moment doubt that the author would have been more than capable of writing in that style, and doing so brilliantly, had she been writing today, when the techniques of doing so have been highly developed through use by many writers in the interim. But Middlemarch is written very much in the omniscient narration style, now out of fashion, and to me, that was its fault. Not only because it's a less familiar style to me, though probably also for that reason, but because it made it harder to see the characters past the narrator. Early on, I made a note comparing the experience of reading it to being at a play where the actors keep freezing while the dramatist steps up to the footlights and tells us not only all of the things they think and feel, but all of the things they don't know and aren't self-aware about, and how all of that relates to their social context. She does it very brilliantly and in memorable, quotable prose, but I did find myself wishing that she'd get out of the way a bit more and give me a closer, less filtered contact with the characters.

Part of my reason for reading the book, as I mentioned, was that I wanted to learn more about the omniscient narrative style by seeing it done with great skill. I achieved that goal, but it didn't make me want to use the style; it showed me the downsides as well as the upsides.

I did enjoy the book considerably, though, and it is excellently written. It enters my Best of the Year list at the Silver tier, for solid books that, for one reason or another, don't quite qualify for gold. Bear in mind that that's a merger of how much I enjoyed the book with how well I judge it to be written; if I was only using the latter criterion, it would be a five-star, platinum-tier book for sure.

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