Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I wanted to read this book before seeing the movie, and I must say that I enjoyed it immensely. Having read most of Maugham's short stories but none of his novels, I was taken aback by the sweep and passion of this book, its strong moral center, and above all its sensitivity to feeling. Other readers have called this a feminist work, and so in a halting way it is, in that Kitty Fane, its central character, is a woman and Maugham looks unusually deeply into her soul. But at the beginning of the book she is almost the polar opposite of feminist, having been brought up by her ambitious middle-class mother to be pretty and vapid and catch a good husband. It is only after she has passed through the climax of the story that she begins to see that there can be better goals in life for a woman. My surprise at the depth of Maugham's portrayal of Kitty is in contrast to what I have always seen as the emotional reticence of his male characters, who are portrayed rather in terms of action than of feeling; I see this as a by-product of the author's homosexuality in an era when this had to be kept hidden. Kitty's husband, Walter Fane, a young government doctor and bacteriologist in Hong Kong, though presumably heterosexual, is almost a caricature of this repressed type. Although he obviously has feelings, he is almost incapable of giving voice to them, and neither he nor Kitty can effectively communicate with one another. It is hardly surprising that Kitty should fall into an affair with a married colonial official who is all easy charm. Even when Walter discovers their liaison (masterfully evoked in the opening pages of the book), he remains cold and inscrutable; his response is to volunteer for service in a cholera-ravaged city in the Chinese interior and to take Kitty with him. As I say, I have not yet seen the movie, only the trailer.* But I was struck by how perfectly Edward Norton captures the cold correctness of Maugham's doctor; I am only surprised that this should have become a star role, since in the novel Maugham keeps Walter very much in the shadows. My other impression from the trailer, the expansive beauty of the Chinese landscape, is also strongly evoked in the book, though I suspect that the movie paints the horrors of the cholera epidemic on a larger canvas and makes more of the background of civil war, which is barely hinted at by Maugham. Instead, once the Fanes reach their destination, the novel takes on a more intimate quality, which slightly disappointed me by playing down the ever-present danger that surrounds them. But the trade-off is that the emphasis can shift to Kitty's tentative spiritual journey. Maugham's title comes from the first line of an unfinished sonnet by Shelley, "Lift not the painted veil which those who live call Life," which implies a metaphysical intent. Here Maugham moves into territory that would later be claimed by Graham Greene; Kitty volunteers at an orphanage run by French nuns, and her first real lessons on life come from her exposure to these women so different from herself in faith and culture. By its mid-point, it seems that the novel is set to follow the familiar path of redemption through sacrifice. And so it does, for a while. But Maugham, to his credit, does not go for the easy melodramatic conclusion. By a series of events that I cannot reveal here, the novel begins to retrace its steps and to wind down from its peak intensity. Kitty is forced not only to confront change, but to recognize in herself the ways in which she has NOT changed. Maugham risks anticlimax in taking this route, and perhaps does not avoid it entirely; but all the same it makes me respect him in a way that nothing else of his that I have read ever has. [*I have now seen the movie on its first day of general release. It is handsome and well acted, but a very different experience from the book. The scenes in the Chinese interior have indeed been opened out as I surmised, and the character of Walter Fane much developed, moving into emotional territories only hinted at by Maugham. On the other hand, the earlier parts of the book are much compressed and the final sections omitted entirely. Perhaps the unusual shape of Maugham's novel would not have worked so well in movie terms, but it is still worth reading for that very reason.]