The Portrait of a Lady

I shall just start off by saying that this is the longest time it has taken me to read a book. Ever. The rhyme and reason to it is that it was so dense in terms of language and Henry James's method of arriving at a point that I couldn't read it as quickly as I would have liked to. But we'll get on to that in just a second.

So, here we are, a second later, and I will continue (thank you very much) with the fact that it wasn't that the subject matter or the characters were overwhelmingly complex, but it was James's way of telling the story through a constant analysis of the emotions, the plot, the characters, the surroundings, and everything else running through the story that it was hard to keep the narrative in sight. It's the first book like this that I have read, and although some people may go right now to look at my previous posts and rather wish to contradict me wholeheartedly, I would just now like to stop them and say that although I have read the works of many other authors who were writing at around the same time as James, none of them use language in quite the same way. Austen, for example, rarely goes into detail about events that are not essential to the story, and skips over them as though they didn't even happen. In stark contrast, James delves into the hidden meaning in every tiny detail, with which The Portrait of a Lady is riddled. Anne Bronte, too, mainly concentrates on what the characters feel, but it is more what they feel in a particular moment, rather that what they have been feeling over the past year, or how the change in X made her feel Y. In that respect, it was quite refreshing to read something so different to other books.

Another difference was that the story did not end happily! I won't go into detail, but our heroine, Isabel Archer, is left feeling unsure, Madame Merle guilty, Gilbert Osmond outraged, and Ralph Touchett in a rather dramatically changed state of health (I said I wouldn't go into detail!). In any case, it was nice that Isabel didn't get what she wanted, for a change!

The quality of James's writing, however dense it is, is undeniably superb. One cannot argue that it is base because it makes too much sense. One can't argue that it is flowery and over-decorated, because everything that has been written seems to have a specific purpose. Even the tidbits of humour are there clearly because James wanted to make his readers laugh; James is most definitely a master of his art. The end is perfectly planned, and even the massive twist, written with just a hint of the melodramatic, is delightful to the gossip within us. The story seems natural, and everything that the characters do seem natural, almost as though it couldn't have been any other way. You know when a story is good when it does this.

Next, I'll be stepping away from eighteenth century England and going to Alabama in the 1930s, as I shall be (re)reading To Kill a Mockingbird - for the third time. Not that I want to boast about it or anything, but yeah, the third time.