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A review by generalheff
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
1.0
I read and review a lot of books so I feel positively dirty for reviewing a book I have not finished! However, I trained as an epidemiologist and am all too aware of the fact that simply ignoring individuals who drop out of clinical trials early (right-censored data) will, obviously, bias your results. Indeed it is most likely to flatter the drug or intervention in question (people who drop out may have suffered hideous side effects for example). So pharma, so publishing: if all the people who dislike a book so strongly 'drop out' of reading it - and by reasons of conscience also opt not to review it - we will again end up in a situation where the average score is flattered and key evidence against the book is lost. This at least is the overly intellectual way I'm justifying reviewing this book (a similar process led me to score the terrible film Friday on Letterboxd recently despite quitting out halfway through).
What makes this book so awful (at least the first thirty odd pages): the introduction makes clear that the writing style will be stilted and tortuous. Defoe introduces the pseudonymous Moll Flanders (the author seeing fit to "conceal her true name" for the sake of propriety) and justifies telling such a licentious story for the sake of teaching the good how to live virtuously. It appears to me simply a means of selling the book to a more-easily titillated 17th century public while at the same time achieving Defoe's apparent aim to satirise serious moralising books of his day. The problem is, read today, discussions of virtue don't really register the same, making whatever this introduction might have meant to Defoe's audience hard to discern for the casual (read: not a university student) audience today.
Once the book proper begins, we switch to Moll's perspective. The writing style is the same: tortuous 17th century prose that is tiring to parse. The approach to the narrative compounds the tedium, as the rhythm is essentially 'I did this then this happened to me then I went there'. Even where we have dialogue between characters it is cast in a peculiar format. In early scenes where Moll reports the conversations between a brother and sister, instead of 'the sister said such and such' it is rendered as 'such and such, says the sister'. And then "Her younger brother cried this or that". There is something bizarrely stilted about all these interactions that pulls the reader right out of any sense of action or activity and constantly reminds us we are reading a rendition of events à la biography rather than à la novel.
What of the story itself? In the pages I read, Moll reports on her childhood (I first lived with the Gypsies, then with a woman in Colchester, everyone laughed when I said I wanted to be a gentlewoman and so on and so on). The formulaic delivery of all this information is compounded by the lack of believably, interesting characters to get a handle on and engage with. The constant harping on about how this or that event echoes in her disastrous future is exhausting ("But that which I was too vain of was my ruin" or "I saw the Cloud, tho' I did not foresee the Storm"). Most of this "ruin" is simply the 'crime' of having sex; I cringed reading Defoe's rendition of how this soon-to-be-fallen woman described her first time. "I made no more Resistance to him, but let him do just what he pleas'd; and as often as he pleas'd; and thus I finish'd my own Destruction at once, for from this Day, being forsaken of my Virtue, and my Modesty, I had nothing of Value left to recommend me, either to God's Blessing, or Man's Assistance.". Of course all this looks ridiculous in 2021 but even attempting to overcome my modern views it all comes across as deeply lazy storytelling.
Moll might be developed eventually as a character, but in the beginning she is just a vessel for society's views. This is, so I'm told, a satire so this may all be by clever design but read today that aspect is lost while the tedious storytelling and dull plot cannot stand on its own. I was reminded in all this of Justine by Sade; that book is infinitely more gruesome and violent than Moll Flanders. But both appear to tell the story of a potentially pure or virtuous woman who is buffeted by fortunes in a world seemingly out to corrupt her. I imagine Moll Flanders becomes a little more of a protagonist in her story than Justine, but I didn't care to find out. She falls into prostitution, provides a little bit of scintillating entertainment for the reader of the time, provides amusement as an apparently satirical take on sententious contemporary books to the more erudite reader, and is ultimately redeemed. Not a bit of which is interesting to read today. My next but one book is Robinson Crusoe. That will be the acid test of whether I dislike Defoe or simply this book. Till then, I will busy myself with a book worth my time.
What makes this book so awful (at least the first thirty odd pages): the introduction makes clear that the writing style will be stilted and tortuous. Defoe introduces the pseudonymous Moll Flanders (the author seeing fit to "conceal her true name" for the sake of propriety) and justifies telling such a licentious story for the sake of teaching the good how to live virtuously. It appears to me simply a means of selling the book to a more-easily titillated 17th century public while at the same time achieving Defoe's apparent aim to satirise serious moralising books of his day. The problem is, read today, discussions of virtue don't really register the same, making whatever this introduction might have meant to Defoe's audience hard to discern for the casual (read: not a university student) audience today.
Once the book proper begins, we switch to Moll's perspective. The writing style is the same: tortuous 17th century prose that is tiring to parse. The approach to the narrative compounds the tedium, as the rhythm is essentially 'I did this then this happened to me then I went there'. Even where we have dialogue between characters it is cast in a peculiar format. In early scenes where Moll reports the conversations between a brother and sister, instead of 'the sister said such and such' it is rendered as 'such and such, says the sister'. And then "Her younger brother cried this or that". There is something bizarrely stilted about all these interactions that pulls the reader right out of any sense of action or activity and constantly reminds us we are reading a rendition of events à la biography rather than à la novel.
What of the story itself? In the pages I read, Moll reports on her childhood (I first lived with the Gypsies, then with a woman in Colchester, everyone laughed when I said I wanted to be a gentlewoman and so on and so on). The formulaic delivery of all this information is compounded by the lack of believably, interesting characters to get a handle on and engage with. The constant harping on about how this or that event echoes in her disastrous future is exhausting ("But that which I was too vain of was my ruin" or "I saw the Cloud, tho' I did not foresee the Storm"). Most of this "ruin" is simply the 'crime' of having sex; I cringed reading Defoe's rendition of how this soon-to-be-fallen woman described her first time. "I made no more Resistance to him, but let him do just what he pleas'd; and as often as he pleas'd; and thus I finish'd my own Destruction at once, for from this Day, being forsaken of my Virtue, and my Modesty, I had nothing of Value left to recommend me, either to God's Blessing, or Man's Assistance.". Of course all this looks ridiculous in 2021 but even attempting to overcome my modern views it all comes across as deeply lazy storytelling.
Moll might be developed eventually as a character, but in the beginning she is just a vessel for society's views. This is, so I'm told, a satire so this may all be by clever design but read today that aspect is lost while the tedious storytelling and dull plot cannot stand on its own. I was reminded in all this of Justine by Sade; that book is infinitely more gruesome and violent than Moll Flanders. But both appear to tell the story of a potentially pure or virtuous woman who is buffeted by fortunes in a world seemingly out to corrupt her. I imagine Moll Flanders becomes a little more of a protagonist in her story than Justine, but I didn't care to find out. She falls into prostitution, provides a little bit of scintillating entertainment for the reader of the time, provides amusement as an apparently satirical take on sententious contemporary books to the more erudite reader, and is ultimately redeemed. Not a bit of which is interesting to read today. My next but one book is Robinson Crusoe. That will be the acid test of whether I dislike Defoe or simply this book. Till then, I will busy myself with a book worth my time.