W. Somerset Maugham- The Painted Veil

The Painted Veil

Vintage

W. Somerset Maugham

1925

Other Maugham Reviews- The Magician - The Moon and Sixpence - Cakes and Ale - The Narrow Corner - The Razor's Edge

“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."

One of the things I like the most about keeping this obsessive blog flowing is the ability to look back at the past few years and map out my own progress, altogether giving me a better understanding of my typical reading habits. On top of that, it stops me from finishing one book and rushing straight into another, instead forcing me to more fully contemplate each book with the goal of producing a blog review so that I feel like I've achieved something. No author has benefited more from this process under the gaze of my critical eye than one W. Somerset Maugham (I'm sure he'd be very proud), whose bibliography first captured my imagination almost three (!) years ago with the hastily-reviewed The Razor's Edge. Since that fateful moment I've become more and more appreciative of each Maugham book I've read, with the pinnacle standing as the sublime The Moon and Sixpence.

Furious Maugham

Still, despite all that, when I sat down to begin reading The Painted Veil (chosen randomly from the four Maugham books on my to-read pile) I wasn't expecting to do something I haven't done since 2007 with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and sit and read the damn thing start to finish (well, with the odd break to make coffee and such)- and I only did that with Potter because I had a six hour window before the book's owner, who had just purchased it on midnight release, took it away on a bus journey, so that's my excuse. But anyway, I didn't intend to read The Painted Veil so quickly, but found it so engrossing I couldn't help myself, and at roughly 250-pages it was just the right length to finish in around 2-3 hours. Oh, and before I started reading I dropped my copy and broke the spine, so I had to literally hold it together to read.

It's not even as if I was blown away to the point where The Painted Veil became my new favourite Maugham novel. For the first thirty-or-so pages I thought I was set to be very disappointed, as Maugham led me down a false path in regards to the genre before opening up into his usual quality. Written in the third-person, The Painted Veil is the story of lead protagonist Kitty Garstin, a pretty young girl living amongst the British gentry of colonial Hong Kong. The opening segments of the book duped me into assuming the worst, that this book might be an uncomplicated romance novel. Maugham described Kitty, unhappy with her boring, inattentive scientist husband Walter, throwing herself into the arms of the witty and dashing (but also married) Charles Townsend- and all that was left, seemingly, was for them to find a way to get free of their partners (what with divorce being difficult back then and infidelity being illegal) and they'd be set for a future together.  

Pocket Books

When Kitty spills the truth of her affair, Maugham finally pulls back the wool from his reader's eyes to reveal the characters in a far more detailed light. Kitty, reveals her naivety by failing to realise Charles is simply one cad of many, promising Kitty a future life together to get her into bed. Walter, meanwhile, transforms under the realisation he is a cuckold, abandoning the image of a loving, devoted husband to reveal himself as cynical, dangerously intelligent, and unpredictable. He tells Kitty that he is to travel to China in a seemingly-selfless attempt to use his medical knowledge in the fight against a deadly outbreak of cholera. With nowhere else to go, she follows him to the sight of a convent acting as a make-shift hospital, where death is a constant presence.

Maugham uses these morbid and depressing surroundings and its characters to effect a transformation in Kitty, to replace her immature naivety with tougher worldly experiences. The eccentric new characters Kitty meets here essentially shape her personality, giving her increased strength through opening her up to alternate ideas about the world. Maugham's carefully-selected prose is outstanding and compelling,  shifting the his writing style to represent the changes experienced within Kitty. I mostly followed and enjoyed her transformation, mostly admiring Maugham's ability to hold such a delicate, changing character study so carefully, but by the end I must admit I hadn't been completely sold on the character, mostly because despite growing as a person as she does, Kitty still has the propensity to cry at every available opportunity, which became somewhat annoying closer to the end of the novel.

I think that's down to Maugham's insistence on never making his central characters too appreciable- he avoids a predictable heroic outcome or much of a happy ending by resisting the temptation to ultimately make his creations too successful, leaving the reader ambiguous as to their eventual fate. His character development is so focused that I think Maugham would have  done himself a disservice through writing a happier ending; as always he leaves the reader with plenty to contemplate and no hard answers. Though I raced through the book I wasn't left with the same sense of thoughtful awe that I was with Moon and Sixpence or The Narrow Corner- part of that because I wasn't as emotionally invested in the central characters- probably because, as good as Maugham is, I can't buy into his portrayal of female characters as I do his males.

In conclusion, I wouldn't recommend The Painted Veil as anyone's first Maugham book since there are better ones available, but after I had become immersed in his style and themes from prior books this was another interesting take on his central themes of human obsession and spiritual discovery.

W. Somerset Maugham- The Narrow Corner

The Narrow Corner

Penguin

W. Somerset Maugham

1932

Other Maugham Reviews- The Magician - The Moon and Sixpence - Cakes and Ale - The Razor's Edge

“When some incident has shattered the career you’ve mapped out for yourself, a folly, a crime or a misfortune, you mustn’t think you’re down and out. It may be a stroke of luck, and when you look back years later you may say to yourself that you wouldn’t for anything in the world exchange the new life disaster has forced upon you for the dull, humdrum existence you would have led if circumstances hadn’t intervened.”  

The last time this blog looked at a book from W. Somerset Maugham, it turned this reader into a veritable superfan of the author, determined to one day complete his bibliography. That book was the sublime The Moon and Sixpence, and, by complete coincidence, the next Maugham book I somewhat randomly chose happened to be technically a spin-off. As the author explains himself in his short introduction, the genesis for The Narrow Corner came from his nagging compulsion to fully explore an anecdote told to the prior novel's narrator by a grizzled old sea dog named Captain Nichols; about an incident some years earlier where he'd been hired to sail a murder suspect away from Sydney and around the south Oceanic seas. The idea refused to budge from his mind, and so thirteen years later came the publication of The Narrow Corner- part adventure, part thriller, all of it a compelling character study on the weaknesses of man.

Elderly Maugham

The structure of the novel is actually a fairly straightforward series of set-pieces, that by themselves contain a simple plot typically more reminiscent of a novella, or perhaps stage performance. The meat of the novel comes from Maugham's explorations of the themes and moral dilemmas provoked by the characters' experiences, portrayed through either long, thoughtful conversations between the protagonists or through Maugham's omniscient depiction of the thoughts of one character in particular. As the novel begins, Captain Nichols is indeed guiding a suspicious young Australian man through the South Seas, the irritable Fred Blake, who claims to be searching the area for a suitable location to invest in real estate.

On the (I believe fictional) island of Takana they encounter the enigmatic Englishman Dr. Saunders, who, against Blake's wishes, convinces the Captain to give him passage off the island, a place he has grown tired of. Saunders completes a trinity of opposing yet reflective personalities that Maugham uses to debate varying philosophies on life, resulting in the aforementioned long conversations spiked with introspective musings. Though the book is written with third person narration, Saunders seems to be very much Maugham's own persona inserted into the equation, and it is his thoughts that are directly explored in the prose, somewhat shaping the reader's impression of Captain Nichols and Fred Blake. Saunders tells little of his past, but seems to be a well-traveled unjudging sage of sorts, with a strong moral compass of his own but also compassion for the tribulations of those perceived as bad. He matches up very well with Nichols, who is himself a definite rogue; a pirate or a smuggler depending on the possibility of profit, but with a sense of good humour and self-justification strong enough to make him an amiable, likable rapscallion- or so it seems.

Avon

Fred Blake is the odd man out. Aggressive and insecure, he clashes with Nichols constantly, though Saunders as the middleman is able to discern that he's really a scared young man on the run. After the trio sail away from the island, and after Maugham has spent plenty of time establishing their personalities and creating a sense of foreboding, they find themselves stuck on a remote exotic island, where they meet the few Europeans settled there, including the spiritually and morally pure Dutchman Erik, and his beautiful fiance Louise. Erik stands as a shining example of a man who has achieved a form of nirvana, at peace with the world and himself, he exists as a marked contrast to his three cynical visitors.

The irresistible figure of Louise is more or less an alternative example of Chekhov's gun, in that her very existence is like a flagpole to the reader that events are about to head south. When they do, Blake also confesses the truth of his situation and how it began, and the direct parallels between his past and present bring further insight into the novel's primary themes regarding the nature of man's morality when put in pressing circumstances. There's a final revelation saved for the very end that I can't spoil but which prospectively turns the readers' final perspective regarding Maugham's themes on its head, depending on one's prior opinion of Captain Nichols.

Pan

I found the novel to be a quick, compelling read, albeit inferior in aura to other Maugham novels I'd read previously; lacking a magnetic personality like Charles Strickland in Moon and Sixpence or Oliver Haddo in The Magician. It's a much tighter story with a more cohesive resolution than those books, and in the fortnight since I finished it I've found the character motivations and decisions have stuck with me, cropping up in my thoughts with a deeper resonance than first thought. There is no true hero in the novel. Erik holds noble values, he crumbles when faced with the harsh realities of the wider world. Dr. Saunders is too morally ambiguous, though he understands the truth of events more than any other character. Captain Nichols is the most interesting of all, a lovable rogue whose good nature disguises an extremely malleable moral compass.

The Narrow Corner is another exemplary novel from Maugham. Short, structured, and easy to read, but with a deeper meaning permeating every detail. He continues to be one of the most rewarding writers of those that I'm following.

W. Somerset Maugham- The Moon and Sixpence

The Moon and Sixpence

W. Somerset Maugham

1919

Other Maugham Reviews- Cakes and Ale - The Magician - The Razor's Edge 

“For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.”

After reading the three W. Somerset Maugham novels linked to above, I'd gained a solid appreciation for the author's obvious natural ability for descriptive, thoughtful and insightful prose- but I'd yet to experience a story that totally captivated me from beginning to end. The Magician was a fun Gothic horror, seemingly drawing from authors like Lovecraft and Poe, but it admittedly lacked a consistent quality of prose that I had found in the two other books; both written later in Maugham's career, but themselves lacking a narrative that I felt fully engaged with. Either that, or maybe different authors, when read a good number of years after their heyday, need a certain amount of time for their style to really click with the reader. I'm usually impatient when dealing with new to-me authors I decide I don't like, but with Maugham I always had the feeling that he really was brilliant and I just didn't understand him yet. The Moon and Sixpence proved me right.

This 200-pages plus novel (released just following Maugham's most widely-praised book Of Human Bondage, which I have on the to-read shelf) was inspired and re-engineered from the real-life story of French post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin (of whom I knew nothing bout prior to this). A mercurial figure whose artistic genius wasn't appreciated until after his death, Gauguin's obsession with his art at the expense of everything else in his life must have peaked the interest of an author who cares much about portraying the human capabilities for obsession. Under Maugham's re-imagining, Gauguin became the English Charles Strickland; a character who left a massive impression upon me. Rather than have Strickland himself narrate or use an omniscient narrator, Maugham chooses to go the route of The Great Gatsby, creating a perhaps semi-autobiographical unnamed writer to recount the key occurrences of Strickland's later life, from both personal contact ('friendship' would be a slight exaggeration) and later by investigating second-hand accounts from others.

Stern Maugham

This degree of seperation between Strickland and the audience is Maugham's masterstroke, as it retains enough of an element of mystery to keep Strickland as an enigma. He is, by the standards of normal civilised humans, a detestable figure; a stockbroker who suddenly leaves his unsuspecting wife and children in London with not a care for them, moving to Paris to live in poverty while persuing his obsessive need to paint. He is similarly fowl to those who treat him as a friend in Paris, callously taking what he needs from them without remorse, offering in return only a dry wit and total honesty.

Ingrained in Strickland's artistic mind is a contempt for demands of society that adds a pureness of personality that I found constantly compelling to read about. Unlike Jay Gatsby he is not a nice man, but his presence is the same- an aura of unique genius that only certain people can see and appreciate. As the narrator loses personal contact with Strickland and later investigates what became of the posthumously famous artist, the sense of detachment from the truth grows, and so Strickland's new life in the remoteness of Tahiti (based on Gauguan's real exploits, though seemingly heavily romanticized) adds more mystery to the image of this unique character.

I massively, massively enjoyed The Moon and Sixpence from beginning to end, drawn in by the magnetism of the characters and crispness of Maugham's prose. Though I have almost no interest in art, Maugham presented an evocative, resonant world among poverty in Paris, driven by a fascination with a man who fit in with society whatsoever and whom bluntly challenges any typical social conventions that get in his way. Maugham's writing is just superb, whether it be the battling dialogue or careful conclusions from a considerate narrator, and it had me reading faster and more consistently than each of his prior works I looked at. I know this is asking for disappointment, but I hope that my future experiences with him offer the same kind of enjoyment.

W. Somerset Maugham- Cakes and Ale

Cakes and Ale

W. Somerset Maugham

1930

Other Maugham Reviews- Cakes and Ale - The Magician - The Razor's Edge

"You see, she wasn’t a woman who ever inspired love. Only affection. It was absurd to be jealous over her. She was like a clear deep pool in a forest glade into which it’s heavenly to plunge, but it is neither less cool nor less crystalline because a tramp and a gipsy and a gamekeeper have plunged into it before you.”

Cakes and Ale is a very curious book, at only two hundred pages long (in my edition) it's almost a novella that tells a meandering story and begins in a style and setting that gave me certain expectations then suddenly defied them with a flourish. W. Somerset Maugham is an author who I find massively intriguing, a man whose image, background and reputation combine to offer a certain reputable image that, I'm increasingly finding, exists as only the tip of the iceberg when compared to the depth of personality he brings to his writing. My paperback edition has a quote on the cover from George Orwell, describing Maugham as 'the modern writer who has influenced me the most', and prior to reading I'd pondered that statement, not sure if as an Orwell fan I had seen such influences yet in my small experiences with Maugham. I'd really enjoyed reading The Magician as a dark Gothic horror story, and I'd admired the prose quality of The Razor's Edge (though perhaps not fully appreciating it), but it was only two-thirds of the way through Cakes and Ale that it all began to click properly in my head, the key themes that Maugham had been exploring in each of these novels, attacking them from different angles with different outcomes like George Orwell (or Paul Auster).

To be absolutely honest, until that point I wasn't greatly enjoying Cakes and Ale. I liked it, sure, thanks to Maugham's essentially perfect prose writing and his colourful characters of London literary society, but beyond that it was falling flat in the sense that I couldn't bring myself to care enough about his satire on said literary society, I couldn't see anything further than that. Maugham writes from the first person through his surely somewhat autobiographical creation William Ashenden, who is asked suddenly by a literary biographer for information regarding the life of his deceased contemporary Edward Driffield. Most of the novel is framed through Ashenden's account of his memories of Driffield, from their young manhood as aspiring authors to his eventual demise. Drifting in and out through key moments over the years (similar to Maugham's own meta-narration of The Razor's Edge) Ashenden recalls a controversial story of love and of freedom mostly regarding Driffield's first wife Rosie, a stand-out character who the events of the plot revolve around.

It wasn't really until the Ashendon becomes a more active part of the events, as one of Rosie's lovers that I really caught on to the novel's themes. Maugham writes Rosie as a completely free-loving character who seems like a force of nature, impossible to control or keep but a perfect muse for the literary men of the novel. I wouldn't call her a hippy, but Maugham was ahead of his time in the creation of a character with many of the same attributes. Through Ashendon, who for a time falls in love with Rosie, Maugham eventually philsophises on the nature of love and obsession, of fidelity and freedom in long passages that I loved (and which made the Orwell connection make more sense to me, compared to something like Coming Up for Air). The elder, narrating Ashden's ruminations of the winding events of the story lead him to defend the liberal notions of romantic freedom against the condemnation automatically placed upon them by his contemporary society. Maugham even gives the reader the happy conclusion that I know I wanted, when Ashendon is finally reunited with Rosie decades after last seeing her.

In a sense it seems odd to me that I'm now so upbeat about a novel that for two thirds of I had only enjoyed in patches, but this is a novel that requires some perseverance, as though Maugham's descriptions of the lives and sensibilities of decent society needed such emphasis for the sense of satire to push through. Personally I didn't find the book funny at all; the biting commentary on the establishment is incredibly dry, and the fullness of the characters and poignancy of Ashendon's observations seemed so strong to me that the satire felt more tragic than anything else. The ending really does a lot for the book, and while I'm hesitant to fully spoil it I will say that it came across as a decisive victory for the liberal spirit of Rosie Driffield, and almost a reward for the reader when learning of her eventual fate. The themes of the novel are so entwined within the characters, and Maugham is such a patiently-spoken narrator that the ending felt very satisfying for me. I think this might be the book where I really properly began to understand Maugham and his most important literary themes, with the reward for struggling through the groundwork making it all entirely worthwhile.

W. Somerset Maugham- The Magician

The Magician

Vintage Classics

 W. Somerset Maugham

1908

Other Maugham Reviews- Cakes and Ale - The Magician - The Razor's Edge

  

"Yet magic is no more the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love, and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic hs but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen."

Riding a mysterious crest of enthusiasm that pushed me forward into writing four posts in about two weeks (side affects yet to be determined), I raced through my next book of choice with a velocity which I haven't experienced in some time, finishing it in about two days (not an impressive brag by any means, but for me the rigours of daily life and its distractions have increased my average reading time for each new book to roughly infinity). Partially, I must admit, this speed was down to the fact that I wrote The Darkened Wardrobe and it reminded me very precisely of just how out of control my unread book pile had become, but the absolute core reason was simply that W. Somerset Maugham's The Magician was the perfect book to capture my attention from beginning to end.

My first exposure to Maugham was through The Razor's Edge, clumsily reviewed on this blog during that curious period where the reviewer only has the context of the one book by the author to go by. It left me with certain impressions of Maugham's style and themes (some of which were even correct) and left me open to more by the author, but things didn't become clearer until reading The Magician opened things up for me. The modern copy I read opens with an author's note entitled A Fragment of Autobiography (presumably included in all new editions of the novel, as I can't imagine reading The Magician without the invaluable context given here) which lays out the obvious inspiration for this book, and in turn completely captured my attention.

Mr. Crowley

Perhaps the most famous of all of W. Somerset Maugham's work (though some might argue the case for Of Human Bondage), The Magician's notoriety exists as an alternative-classic; that is, a novel that primarily appeals to literary hipsters looking for something a little different in tone to your average Charles Dickens novel, and that's because it is decidedly both a gothic horror masterpiece and the birthplace of a very notorious character. As Maugham explains in his introduction; during his earlier years as a struggling younger author attending high societal events, he became well acquainted with a certain Mr. Aleister Crowley. Though the Wikipedia link offers far more actual information than I'm going to bother with, I'm guessing that most people reading will at least recognise the name as the most famous occultist in history. Maugham's introduction sets the scene more firmly for the transition of Aliester Crowley into Oliver Haddo, the villain of The Magician, as a fictional version of Crowley who actually possesses the knowledge of arcane, sinister magics that Crowley claimed to.

The Magician, as a novel, isn't concerned with the stark reality of Crowley's claims and styling, but instead goes about structuring the character of Oliver Haddo into a complex and cultured, if far from original, villain. As Maugham's novels often are, it is set amongst the high class cafes and homes of Paris and London, and the introduction of Haddo is based upon Maugham's encounters with Crowley. The story begins with a small group of characters encountering Haddo for the first time and reacting to his outlandish claims and appearance. Morbidly obese yet tall, handsome and compelling, Haddo regales his new acquaintances with outlandish claims about his life and beliefs, both fascinating and disgusting them in equal measure. The character of Arthur Burdon is the lead protagonist and the reader's primary identification figure, as a witty, slightly withdrawn skeptic who immediately takes a huge dislike to Haddo. Arthur's fiance, Margaret Dauncey is similarly disgusted and disbelieving, but nonetheless is drawn by Haddo's heir of mystery to indulge his stories. The overall progression of the plot from then on is fairly simple and predictable; Arthur and Haddo inevitably clash and Haddo is embarrassed, from which point the magician plans his silent revenge by using his clandestine means to take what is most valuable to Arthur.  


Earlier on I described The Magician as a gothic horror, and it is that in every regard. Maugham's prose style is lavishly detailed in provoking the tone from every line, very positively reminiscent of Victorian English authors like Dickens, but with an extra emphasis on promoting mystery and suspense. I actually feel somewhat silly even attempting to review the talent of an author like Maugham, since he's so clearly an absolute master of the English language, able to construct a sentence with a natural talent few others can hope to match. There's a great sense of adventure that comes with the supernatural elements of this book, combining with the idea of a somewhat heroic protagonist like Arthur to make this reader immediately and favourably compare this with the most famous of all the gothic masterpieces, Bram Stoker's Dracula. Perhaps a lazy example, but Maugham's Oliver Haddo has the same undeniable charismatic personality as Stoker's vampire, to the extent where he leaps off the page as the constant star. It would be easy to predict dozens of re imaginations of Haddo, though the only one I know of is Alan Moore's usage of the character as a primary villain in his literary-obsessed comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (at some point to be a focus of my Comics Snobbery posts). Also, without giving too much away as regards to the plot, there are elements of the story very much routed in the other gothic horror classic Frankenstein, but with a hint of HP Lovecraft mixed in too.

While I hate to try and criticise a work like this, if I must then it has to be on the same grounds that Aliester Crowley himself critiqued it under (in an article in Vanity Fair circa 1908), it's simply not very original; nothing particularly unique occurs in the plot or with the characters. This didn't bother me one bit, as it's clear from the introduction, the blurb, and the opening chapters that this is a stylistic piece of genre fiction merely concerned with doing what it does as well as possible. Maugham's crafting of the environment is sublime, and once the plot and characters have been established within the gothic horror genre it allows the author to present his own themes and motifs also prevalent in his other works. Maugham focusses on love, obsession, and the thin line separating the two. As in Dracula it is the fear of loss and helplessness in relation to the fate of a loved one that pushes through the tension and sadness surrounding the somewhat unbelievable, almost pulp-fiction like plot. Arthur is a simple protagonist designed to transmit the easily identifiable fear of helplessly losing a loved one to the reader, and then to show the clenched-fist, gritted-teeth, do-what-has-to-be-done English gentleman style response. It is glorious stuff, five star genre fiction that I would mark as an essential read to anyone with an interest in this style of dark, supernatural-based story, particularly as an example of a classical style addressing a subject that's sure to be immediately recognizable to a modern reader thanks to the deluge of similar supernatural stories of today.

W. Somerset Maugham- The Razor's Edge

The Razor's Edge

Vintage Classics

W. Somerset Maugham

1944

Other Maugham Reviews- Cakes and Ale - The Magician - The Razor's Edge

"It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them."

When I first picked this book up off the shelf, I had no real idea of what to expect. W. Somerset Maugham was just a name I'd vaguely heard of, but I really had no idea who he was, nor of the type of novels he wrote. The Razor's Edge caught my attention because, and this is somewhat shallow of me, the edition I found was a really nice-looking Random House vintage classic with an eye-catching Leon Benigni artwork cover (the one above, actually), and a back cover blurb describing it as exactly the type of book I'd like to read.

For the first one hundred and fifty pages or so, I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to say I enjoyed The Razor's Edge or not. Essentially, the book is a concentrated, dedicated character study involving a small cast of characters, following their lives over a series of important and meaningful character developments. One of these characters is Maugham himself; the author is both the narrator and a character in the book, albeit one whose purpose is to provoke the other characters into personal conversations with personal revelations and private admissions, and who slips in and out of their lives with gaps of a year or more before returning.

W. Somerset Boss Mustache

The real lead character in the book is the enigmatic Larry Darrell; a young veteran of the second world war whose life changes dramatically as he finds a new age direction in it. Larry breaks off his engagement to his fiance Isabel, then moves from Chicago to Paris, and then to the East of the world as he searches to explore his own spirituality and for answers to the great questions of life. Maugham, Larry, Isabel, and Isabel's second choice husband Gray Maturin then all meet semi-regularly in Paris, catching up with the changes in each of their lives.

It took me a little while to get into this book, particularly regarding the style and purpose. Maugham isn't interested in directly exploring the adventures of these characters for the sake of the event, but instead writes reels of conversational dialogue that gets to the heart of each of his characters without being ham-fisted or seeming unnatural. By the end of the book I felt as a reader that I'd been given a brief glimpse into a real life, albeit one seemingly influenced by other notable authors of the era. Maugham, an English writer takes a distinctly American tone with his mostly-American characters, and touches on aspects of The Great Gatsby and other Fitzgeraldian tones with perhaps a hint of earlier George Orwell in the style of the narrative prose. Ultimately I enjoyed the book, but wasn't bowled over by it. I do want to read Maugham's other famous work, On Human Bondage, but there's no rush to persue his bibliography just yet.