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A review by phileasfogg
The Green Hat by Michael Arlen
3.0
Not a lot happens in the first half of this novel. There are some great sentences. There are sentences that had the potential for greatness, but they go too far in their Yoda-esque syntax, in their, to me, un-unravelable knots of clauses; sentences that are, dare I of all people say? a tad overwritten. Occasionally, when sense failed to penetrate a particularly complex sentence, I wondered if the editor had put a punctuation mark in the wrong place. (And surely those midgets on pages 219 and 239 were actually midges?) I was astounded that this had been a bestseller in 1924. Whatever its merits, and there were some, it didn't seem like something a lot of people would enjoy.
In the second half the pace increased, and the last hundred pages flew, like Iris's bright yellow car through the dark countryside. I could understand then why it was so successful. For much of the novel we are bothered by the stuffy Englishness of most of the characters, the unchallenged happiness-denying rules they maintain. The climax of the novel confronts that old England with a passion and anger that the English wanted to hear in 1924. It feels like the youth of England facing down the old order that led their friends and brothers to the slaughterhouse of the 1914-1918 war.
There are points of historical interest: the loss, still much felt in 1924, of so many young men in the war; and the medical risks women faced in having children or abortions, before penicillin. The latter aspect may come to make this novel more interesting in decades to come, as we enter the post-antibiotic era.
The novel's greatest strength, and most of the reason it still enjoys the popularity it does, is the character of Iris Storm. Iris is like a 21st-century 1st-world woman, trying to live in high society in the early 20th century, where such a woman is a scandalous oddity.
In the second half the pace increased, and the last hundred pages flew, like Iris's bright yellow car through the dark countryside. I could understand then why it was so successful. For much of the novel we are bothered by the stuffy Englishness of most of the characters, the unchallenged happiness-denying rules they maintain. The climax of the novel confronts that old England with a passion and anger that the English wanted to hear in 1924. It feels like the youth of England facing down the old order that led their friends and brothers to the slaughterhouse of the 1914-1918 war.
There are points of historical interest: the loss, still much felt in 1924, of so many young men in the war; and the medical risks women faced in having children or abortions, before penicillin. The latter aspect may come to make this novel more interesting in decades to come, as we enter the post-antibiotic era.
The novel's greatest strength, and most of the reason it still enjoys the popularity it does, is the character of Iris Storm. Iris is like a 21st-century 1st-world woman, trying to live in high society in the early 20th century, where such a woman is a scandalous oddity.
And again I couldn't help thinking of her as of someone who had strayed into our world from a strange land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who were calmly awaiting the inheritance of our world when we should have annihilated one another in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality.