Matthew Ted's Reviews > The Razor's Edge

110th book of 2021.

Our guests the other day were some of our English family friends who have lived in France for the last 20 or so years (I’ve written about their home in Aston in my mostly non-review of Lolita here). Naturally, we sat around eating a lot of food (lentil shepherd’s pie, with equal number vegetarians to not) and drinking good drink (lager, Limoncello, Bailey’s, Norwegian potato spirits). The adults went to bed and I was left with B., the daughter (a year younger than me) and her boyfriend, S., a Frenchman from Toulouse. By this time, we were a little drunk and more talkative. I told them that I hated England and wanted to live the European/transatlantic life. It was to easy to say, drunk, with little money and no command of any language except English. I’ve long flirted with the idea of learning French (in hope of one day living there, even for a time) and German (to read my great-grandfather’s letters in their original language). My hatred of England isn’t absolute and is only amplified with drink. I asked B.’s mother earlier that same night, looking out at W——’s pier if she ever looked at a little English seaside town such as ours and missed it. She said that though she liked to visit England, she would probably never consider coming back; France was her home, and she preferred it.

This isn’t overly relevant but my drunken desires returned to my mind as I read this Maugham novel which trotted between America, England and, as ever with Maugham, France, Paris. Most interestingly, the narrator of this novel is none other than W. Somerset Maugham—he is our protagonist. He’s a sort of Nick Carraway though, our eyes, and in fact at one point a character says to him, ‘‘I look upon you as a disinterested observer’’. The blurb of my edition reads, ‘Maugham himself plays a part, as he wanders in and out of the story, observing his characters struggling with their fates’, and I find this slightly misleading for two reasons. Firstly, Maugham is the ‘I’ in the novel and is consistently present throughout the novel and scenes that do not include him find their way into the plot because they are being reported to him. Secondly, the words ‘observing his characters struggling with their fates’ implies that the novel is self-aware that Maugham is ‘real’ and they are not—this is also not the case; the novel is framed as ‘true’: the characters are as real as Maugham is. From the first page:

This book consists of my recollections of a man with whom I was thrown into close contact only at long intervals, and I have little knowledge of what happened to him in between. I suppose that by the exercise of invention I could fill the haps plausibly enough and so make my narrative more coherent; but I have no wish to do that. I only want to set down what I know of my knowledge.
Many years ago I wrote a novel called ‘The Moon and Sixpence’. In that I took a famous painter, Paul Gauguin, and, using the novelist’s privilege, devised a number of incidents to illustrate the character I had created on the suggestions afforded me by the scanty facts I knew about the French artist. In the present book I have attempted to do nothing of the kind. I have invented nothing.

The blurb sounds like some very meta and Kundera-esque narrative play, but it is not the case; at most points throughout the novel, I forgot that the narrator was ‘Maugham’ and read the story as a novel like any of his others.

And it is like many of his others. This novel is reminiscent in some ways of his others that I have read. Our main focus character, who Maugham refers to in the quoted passage, Larry Darrell, is similar to many other of his inventions. He is in search of the absolute, he appears to give up love, goes in search of something, travels the world, disappearing for long periods of time, lives in poor conditions by choice, eats little (one meal a day), dedicates himself to artistic pursuits (in this case extreme reading), and so on. He is a rather typical Maugham character and brings in the rather typical Maugham themes: the pursuit of knowledge, the concept of ‘genius’, art and life/love, the nature of fame and immortality, Larry is another vehicle for these recurring themes. In this novel there is the added layer of India and mysticism/eastern religion as he converses with Maugham for a large chapter about Hinduism, the soul, reincarnation and the self. This very chapter is one Maugham informs the reader they can skip if they’d like as it brings nothing to the plot other than the fact it is another instance he speaks to Larry.

There is marriage and love and death and all the usual things involved too. Though I very much enjoy reading Maugham’s novels, I am yet to give a single one that full 5-stars and I thought this would finally be the one; it is just missing that spark that tips it over the edge for me, in some ways still too similar to his other novels to stand out from them. Next year I will be reading his other masterpiece, Of Human Bondage so perhaps that will finally grant him a 5-star rating from me. Nevertheless, I never tire of reading about Maugham’s intellectual characters bustling about Europe and beyond, drinking, talking, reading and writing. All the things I wish I was doing, basically.