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While probably the weakest of George Eliot's novels--I've yet to read them all, but I'm getting there--it still has some wonderful things in it, but also some pretty severe deficiencies that hold it back from achieving the profundity of The Mill on the Floss, say, or Silas Marner.
As usual for Eliot, the novel is smoothly written and full of terrific authorial reflections, truisms presented as asides or conclusions from the narrator's observations, that often astound me for their great wisdom. Such sagacity always makes me feel in good hands when reading an Eliot. I just love the voice I'm listening to. Also, as usual, there's a wonderful cast of characters, who are not silly, forced caricatures as in Dickens, but common people made fascinating by the narrator's interest in them and the penetrating eye cast upon them. Again, as in Eliot's other works--really novels of this era and maybe novels in general--our characters are put to the test through adversity and thus the story is pretty engrossing as we're invested in the people and yearn to see how they will cope.
On the downside, however, here I was far more interested in Hetty than in Adam and thus the story ended for me about 50 excruciatingly dreary pages before the novel finally comes to a conclusion. Most of the events leading up to the adversity, as well as these events' eventual outcomes, are so predictable here that I found myself muttering "Get on with it" more than a couple of times, something I never did before when reading an Eliot--hence my assuming this is her weakest work. But, even in Hetty's tale, the skirting and avoiding of the topic of sexual intercourse in a novel that centers around a pregnancy, is doomed to feel, in today's world anyway, rather gutted and even improbable. It's like a pregnant Barbie doll--you can only wonder how she got that way without having any genitalia. It just doesn't ring true, no matter how cleverly our narrator tries to telegraph the information through silence. 600+ pages of silence are rather a lot.
As usual for Eliot, the novel is smoothly written and full of terrific authorial reflections, truisms presented as asides or conclusions from the narrator's observations, that often astound me for their great wisdom. Such sagacity always makes me feel in good hands when reading an Eliot. I just love the voice I'm listening to. Also, as usual, there's a wonderful cast of characters, who are not silly, forced caricatures as in Dickens, but common people made fascinating by the narrator's interest in them and the penetrating eye cast upon them. Again, as in Eliot's other works--really novels of this era and maybe novels in general--our characters are put to the test through adversity and thus the story is pretty engrossing as we're invested in the people and yearn to see how they will cope.
On the downside, however, here I was far more interested in Hetty than in Adam and thus the story ended for me about 50 excruciatingly dreary pages before the novel finally comes to a conclusion. Most of the events leading up to the adversity, as well as these events' eventual outcomes, are so predictable here that I found myself muttering "Get on with it" more than a couple of times, something I never did before when reading an Eliot--hence my assuming this is her weakest work. But, even in Hetty's tale, the skirting and avoiding of the topic of sexual intercourse in a novel that centers around a pregnancy, is doomed to feel, in today's world anyway, rather gutted and even improbable. It's like a pregnant Barbie doll--you can only wonder how she got that way without having any genitalia. It just doesn't ring true, no matter how cleverly our narrator tries to telegraph the information through silence. 600+ pages of silence are rather a lot.