Richard Derus's Reviews > The Razor’s Edge

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Intimate acquaintances but less than friends, they meet and part in postwar London and Paris: Elliot, the arch-snob but also the kindest of men; Isabel, considered to be entertaining, gracious, and tactful; Gray, the quintessence of the Regular Guy; Suzanne, shrewd, roving, and friendly; Sophie, lost, wanton, with a vicious attractiveness about her; and finally Larry, so hard and so trustful, lost in the world's confusion. Their story, one of Somerset Maugham's best, encompasses the pain, passion, and poignancy of life itself.

My Review: It is pleasant to give yourself over to the care of a master, or mistress, of craft. The Razor’s Edge is masterful. It is an expression of the mastery Maugham earned through many long years of novel-writing and mostly successful critical reception of his work that this book, which came almost forty years into a career of more than sixty years, feels as fresh as his first great novel (Of Human Bondage, 1915). It deals, as is the case with so many writers’ oeuvres, with many of the same themes and issues as the first book and most of his subsequent work.

A critic reviewing The Razor’s Edge today would likely fault the author for choosing to write the story from his own first-person point of view. The fashion today is for first-person narratives, it’s true, but Maugham uses a narrative device…the story told to the narrator by others…very much out of fashion in today’s world. It is accused, perhaps with justice, of taking the forward thrust out of a story. It makes the reader a follower, a passive observer of the story, instead of giving the presently fashionable sense of watching the story unfold before the reader’s eyes. In a world that craves “The Real World” and “Survivor,” the technique of the cicerone leading the reader around the story feels artificial and affected. That is too bad. The Razor’s Edge is a pleasant journey in the company of interesting people. It’s not a fast-lane zoom like Less Than Zero, in a car full of noisy meretricious mercenary monkey-boys. It is a subtler pleasure, a trip more akin to touring the blue roads of the American countryside than that superhighway journey.