Monday, 11 December 2017

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

I think George Eliot deserves an award for creating the most self-righteous, pompous, nauseatingly virtuous, unbearably boring protagonist with at least ten sticks up his ass. I literally could not stand the eponymous hero, before whom all the other characters seem to bow down in instinctive reverence. There were a lot of great characters, but Eliot either didn't spend enough time on them, or criticised all the interesting things about them. I thought Gwendolen Harleth was totally fantastic at the beginning of the novel: confident, witty, talented, intelligent, daring, and just overall wonderful, but Eliot had her develop a conscience that crushed every bit of life and fascination out of her. By far the best character (in my opinion) was the absolutely hilarious and adorably good-natured Hans Meyrick, who only appears all too briefly at large intervals. He was so funny and so appealingly loyal (as opposed to the unbearable virtues of Daniel), I think he's one of my favourite George Eliot characters. The more positive characters were indescribably dull. The females of the Meyrick family formed a sort of saccharine Little Women-esque paradise of goodness and hard work. Mirah, the object of Daniel's affections, did only one interesting thing in the entire novel, and that was attempt to drown herself, which Daniel unfortunately prevented. I wish he had left well enough alone, and I would not have been forced to read about the doings of this inconceivably bland woman. Why on earth Daniel was fascinated by the ravings of the consumptive Mordecai, I have no idea, he gave me the sort of feeling you get when you see Christian zealots shouting about how we're all going to hell for using birth control or something, and you would rather run in the face of oncoming traffic to get to the other side of the street than listen to them. In general, even the lizard-like Grandcourt was a better character than the 'good' ones; he might have been manipulative, sadistic and emotionally abusive, but at least he was interesting. I also got really worn out by the style, it's so unflinchingly realistic and the book is so long, that it was just driving me insane by the end. Characters seem to spend most of their time communicating in half-glances and fleeting facial expressions that seem to me to be hard to interpret in any definitive way, but Eliot makes such a huge drama out of them. A look at a woman's bracelet and a quick remark about it winds up leading to a huge marital quarrel, someone looking at someone else for a second longer than they would at a potted plant somehow indicates undying love. These sorts of minute descriptions just seemed to escalate into absurdity. As for the parts about Jews, I was really irritated by them for personal reasons. I'm from a non-practicing Jewish family, and I didn't enjoy reading about the 'common Jews' with their supposed greed and odd customs. This is, of course, opposed to the 'uncommon Jews' who are either visionaries or inordinately talented artists. In general, this is the sort of novel that makes me understand why the Bloomsbury group condemned Victorian writing, even though I usually disagree with them on that.

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