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magsirwin's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
grubstlodger's review against another edition
3.0
I only knew Sylvia Townsend Warner as TH White’s biographer, so I was very intrigued when I came across Mr. Fortune’s Maggot, a novel with a strange name.
And a strange blurb. A banker gets it into his head to become a missionary on an utterly remote in the South Pacific and makes one convert. The blurb intimates that the convert, a young boy, has joined him because of a love, possibly even a physical love. This book was written in 1927, it doesn’t go ‘there’ does it?
Sort of. It’s clear that Mr Fortune has not had many relationships with women, and he actively fears the young, naked, free-spirited women on the island - only really being able to make friends with an older woman who reminds him of his gran. He says that it is ‘his hope to live in charity with all men, girls included’, which I think aptly summarises the abstract way he sees women. It’s also clear that he is attracted to the adolescent boy, Lueli. He imagines ‘ravishing’ him for one brief moment and is frequently stunned by his beauty. Yet - beyond swimming together and oiling each other up, I don’t feel theirs is a physical relationship and it’s mixed and mushed up with the two other main themes of the book, belief and colonialism.
Mr Fortune’s is a very weak version of Christianity, more tied to the comfort of ritual and words, whose moral striving seems to be to be a decent gentleman. After an earthquake, which destroy’s Lueli’s physical God idol and Fortune’s own belief in God, it’s Lueli who feels the loss. Fortune barely misses his God, realising that he was never there to begin with and feeling rather embarrassed with his attempts to convert people.
It doesn’t stop with his colonial impulses though. Where he comes to the island of Fauna to help them by spreading his enlightened religion, when he gives up the religion, he doesn’t give up on the idea of his culture being more enlightened. To try and nudge Lueli out of his funk he tries to teach him geometry, reasoning that it’s a beautiful branch of knowledge that is founded on unequivocal truth. Not only do the lessons not go well, he loses patience far more than he did when he was trying to introduce the boy to more wooly topics like theology.
He concludes that there is a sickness in him and with those who come from colonial powers. That while he does love Lueli and the island, he can’t help trying to change it, that the colonial mind can’t help interfering with what it loves. Even actions like trying to tame parrots shows how he can’t simply leave alone.
When he leaves the island, he’s informed that the first world war has been raging but he doesn’t really care. He goes off unsure of what he’s going to do with his life and so are we.
This was an easy to read, digestible little fable. While Fortune is a bit of an archetypical ‘little man’, he was an interesting protagonist, a man with no real reason to be doing what he’s doing and doing it badly because he isn’t as much on an iron-clad orthodox missionary as he presumed himself to be. The book ends by wishing him luck in his future, and I did too.
And a strange blurb. A banker gets it into his head to become a missionary on an utterly remote in the South Pacific and makes one convert. The blurb intimates that the convert, a young boy, has joined him because of a love, possibly even a physical love. This book was written in 1927, it doesn’t go ‘there’ does it?
Sort of. It’s clear that Mr Fortune has not had many relationships with women, and he actively fears the young, naked, free-spirited women on the island - only really being able to make friends with an older woman who reminds him of his gran. He says that it is ‘his hope to live in charity with all men, girls included’, which I think aptly summarises the abstract way he sees women. It’s also clear that he is attracted to the adolescent boy, Lueli. He imagines ‘ravishing’ him for one brief moment and is frequently stunned by his beauty. Yet - beyond swimming together and oiling each other up, I don’t feel theirs is a physical relationship and it’s mixed and mushed up with the two other main themes of the book, belief and colonialism.
Mr Fortune’s is a very weak version of Christianity, more tied to the comfort of ritual and words, whose moral striving seems to be to be a decent gentleman. After an earthquake, which destroy’s Lueli’s physical God idol and Fortune’s own belief in God, it’s Lueli who feels the loss. Fortune barely misses his God, realising that he was never there to begin with and feeling rather embarrassed with his attempts to convert people.
It doesn’t stop with his colonial impulses though. Where he comes to the island of Fauna to help them by spreading his enlightened religion, when he gives up the religion, he doesn’t give up on the idea of his culture being more enlightened. To try and nudge Lueli out of his funk he tries to teach him geometry, reasoning that it’s a beautiful branch of knowledge that is founded on unequivocal truth. Not only do the lessons not go well, he loses patience far more than he did when he was trying to introduce the boy to more wooly topics like theology.
He concludes that there is a sickness in him and with those who come from colonial powers. That while he does love Lueli and the island, he can’t help trying to change it, that the colonial mind can’t help interfering with what it loves. Even actions like trying to tame parrots shows how he can’t simply leave alone.
When he leaves the island, he’s informed that the first world war has been raging but he doesn’t really care. He goes off unsure of what he’s going to do with his life and so are we.
This was an easy to read, digestible little fable. While Fortune is a bit of an archetypical ‘little man’, he was an interesting protagonist, a man with no real reason to be doing what he’s doing and doing it badly because he isn’t as much on an iron-clad orthodox missionary as he presumed himself to be. The book ends by wishing him luck in his future, and I did too.
bergenslabben's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
bedtimestory's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
skyereads's review
5.0
An incredibly sensitive and self reflecting take on colonialism and Englishness. I was fortunate enough to read a first edition thanks to the library, and having read a good deal of 1920s fiction, much of which is painfully imperial, I am delighted to find STW once again sees through the prejudices of that era and writes something that stands up very well in the light of modern perception.
If the idea of reading a book about an English missionary (and ex-bank employee) trying to convert an island of Polynesians sounds unbearable - I thought much the same, but trust me, this is both touching and very very funny.
If the idea of reading a book about an English missionary (and ex-bank employee) trying to convert an island of Polynesians sounds unbearable - I thought much the same, but trust me, this is both touching and very very funny.
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