I feel odd reviewing Mrs Dalloway just days after writing a lecture-length review of The Hours, which touches upon much the same themes. Yet I think II feel odd reviewing Mrs Dalloway just days after writing a lecture-length review of The Hours, which touches upon much the same themes. Yet I think I'll give it a try.
Mrs Dalloway portrays a day in the lives of various people living in London in 1923. At the heart of the novel is Septimus Warren Smith, a WWI veteran who is suffering from shell shock and schizophrenia. Septimus' descent into madness (clearly modelled on Virginia Woolf's own) and relationship with his spouse are juxtaposed with those of Clarissa Dalloway, a 52-year-old upper-class lady who is about to throw a large party for her MP husband and other more or less illustrious personages. An unexpected encounter with her former suitor Peter Walsh, whom she hasn't seen for many years, leaves Clarissa musing about the past -- about the people she used to know, the people she used to love, and the decisions she has taken over the years. At various points Septimus' and Clarissa's stories intersect, as do several other characters' stories. In exemplary stream-of-consciousness style, Woolf takes us inside the heads of all these characters, sharing with us their thoughts, emotions and impressions of each other. What ensues is less a plot-driven story than a barrage of memories, associations and epiphanies, often tinged with regret and nostalgia. The emphasis is on individual persons' responses to the passage of time and other sources of unhappiness, but in depicting these, Woolf shows the mores and manners of society at large, thus presenting the reader with a microcosm of life, all wrapped up in a single day in the lives of some fairly self-absorbed but reasonably likeable people.
I can see why young and callous readers might dislike Mrs Dalloway, as I've been told many do. The book contains very little dialogue and even fewer exciting plotlines. Yet it would be woefully wrong to state that nothing happens in it, as the internal drama that goes on is ferocious. Take Septimus, for instance, who goes from feeling completely numb to being completely overwhelmed by both society and his own demons. Septimus is a startling character -- the kind of character who very seriously says 'Now we will kill ourselves' in the middle of what his wife thinks is a perfectly happy picnic. For her part, Clarissa Dalloway is hardly less conflicted. She may not be insane (quite the contrary -- to the other characters in the book she seems perfectly in charge of her own life and at ease in society), but she feels like she is suffocating and is torn between various aspects of herself, which prevents her from really making her mark in any significant way. If her day pans out less dramatically than Septimus', it is not for lack of internal fireworks. Like Septimus, Clarissa has to take some major decisions -- decisions that go considerably farther than what kind of flowers to buy for her party.
Woolf's prose is wonderfully fluid. She effortlessly links her characters' stories by means of symbols and metaphors, drawing her strands ever tighter until all the characters meet at Clarissa's party. Moreover, her prose has a marvellously cinematic quality. Her descriptions of people, places and the 'exquisite moments' that brighten up her characters' lives are so vivid that you can easily picture them in your mind's eye, including the cuts that a film director adapting this story to the screen would use. I can think of few more vivid fictional portrayals of London than Mrs Dalloway. As for the characters, they're not all as instantly likeable as mad Septimus and his poor, suffering wife, but in their own quiet, snobbish, understated ways, they're just as real. Woolf knows exactly when to draw them in bold, satirical strokes and when to go for the finer detail. The result is a wonderfully varied slice of life that may not have much action but does touch upon some pretty major themes. The death of the soul, anyone?
I could say more about Mrs Dalloway, but I think Woolf herself said it best when she wrote in her journal before getting started on the book: 'I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system & show it at work, at its most intense.' In her own inimitable way, she did just that, and then some. ...more
What would happen if Satan were to alight on a modern metropolis like Moscow and wreak havoc in it? That's just one of the questions asked and answereWhat would happen if Satan were to alight on a modern metropolis like Moscow and wreak havoc in it? That's just one of the questions asked and answered in this twentieth-century Russian classic, which is said to have been the inspiration for the Rolling Stones song 'Sympathy for the Devil'.
You can see why Mick Jagger and his cronies would be intrigued by the devil as portrayed in The Master and Margarita. Bulgakov's Satan is not necessarily purely evil; he just punishes sceptics and greedy people, and does so in extremely creative ways. He has a lot of personality, and if that weren't enough, he also has a fascinating retinue of demons and zombies who gleefully go about creating their own brand of creative mischief. The result, as you might expect, is an orgy of chaos in which people get killed, scared out of their wits, humiliated and spirited away, usually in fairly inventive ways. It's hard not to admire Bulgakov's imagination in these scenes; he really does come up with some outrageous stuff, and except for the one chapter in which one of the main characters flies over Moscow on a broomstick, you'll buy it -- even the gun-toting cat who cannot be killed. That's how good his writing is.
It's not all wicked mayhem, though. Interwoven with the main story are descriptions of the last days of Pilate and Christ, which seem a bit disjointed at first but have a strangely beautiful quality. These, it turns out, are chapters from a book written by 'the master', an author (surely an autobiographical representation of Bulgakov himself) whose career has been ruined by the authorities. Soviet Russia is never mentioned in the book (its Moscow has a distinctly timeless flavour), but The Master and Margarita is in fact a surreal parody on what was happening during Bulgakov's lifetime, with Satan carrying out the purges Stalin was carrying out in real life. Among other things, Bulgakov satirises literary life in the Soviet Union, which for him wasn't a tremendous lot of fun. He also defends Christianity (albeit in a way the Church did not really appreciate), which in the atheistic Soviet Union was enough of a no-no that he never even tried getting the book published during his lifetime.
While I greatly enjoyed the panache with which Bulgakov describes the demons' exploits and the various layers he seems to weave into the story, I do have a few quibbles with the book. One is that the author comes up with a tremendous cast of characters, many of whom he leaves just a tad too soon for the reader to care about them. As a result, many parts of the book feel rather episodic, especially in the middle. Furthermore, Bulgakov occasionally lets his imagination get the better of him. Margarita's flight over Moscow was one step too far for me, although I have a feeling it will make more sense to me when I reread the book, which I certainly will at some point.
These are minor quibbles, though. For the most part, The Master and Margarita is a very successful, terrifically original and occasionally funny venture into surrealism with many layers which will undoubtedly make for rewarding rereading. I definitely look forward to rereading it. ...more
