The Mill on the Floss

I didn’t get along too well with The Mill on the Floss.  It took me a good fortnight to read it, and yes, that fortnight did include a holiday- but that should have meant uninterrupted plane reading time.   There was some of that, actually, I think I read about a sixth of the book in one go and it still took me bloody ages.  It just wasn’t one of those books that I found myself wanting to go back to when I put it down; add in to that a birthday, a long weekend away, and some ludicrous working hours and you don’t exactly have the perfect recipe for a speedy read.

My second George Eliot read tells the story of Maggie Tulliver and her relationship with a handful of men, most significantly her older brother Tom.  This is actually a pretty well written part of the book, Maggie idolises Tom, she is his childhood shadow, following him around and trying to be like him and then growing older and giving up on a man she cares for because she knows to do otherwise will displease him.  It’s believable and it is well written.  The ending of the book, however, is stupid and ill-contrived.  I don’t want to spoil it too much, but it feels lazy.  As though Eliot needed to quickly draw things to a close.  As endings go it’s essentially a notch above, “And then they woke up and it was all a dream.”

I think this book was another case of setting my expectations by the blurb.  I thought that this was going to be the story of a young woman chaffing against a society and a family that deny her independence and deny her a mind.   Instead, Maggie spends a great deal of the book trying to work out how to best please her brother and her father so that they will love her better.  She is hardly chomping at the bit to get away and have a life of her own.  It’s a shame.  I think the book I imagined this would be would probably have had me more hooked.   That’s not to say that there aren’t flashes of the book that I was expecting- they just don’t endure.  Maggie will argue with Tom, but will always defer to him and his authority in the end.

The book’s also about social climbing, or the ambition to climb socially.  Unsurprisingly, Maggie and Tom’s father owns a mill and wants a better life for his son.   He borrows money so Tom can have an expensive education and move in higher social circles than he does.  Ultimately, he is prevented this dream by circumstance and by the opportunism of rich men.  It’s amazing sometimes, the things that do not change.  Again, I wanted to find this more interesting than I did, but I think that the crux of the issue is that I just didn’t care about Tom.  He’s dull.  Even when being shown through Maggie’s eyes, he is dull.

The Mill on the Floss isn’t by any means bad.  I just don’t think that it was for me.  It wasn’t a particularly memorable read.  I don’t think that I really get what is usually referred to as something wanky like “the earthy humour of the working classes” which does run through the book- there’s a nice joke about clothes being so old that they’re back in style again near the beginning, but aside for that it’s just a bit of a dry book.

My next book is 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke.  In contrast, I read it in a day.