LIFE SEEN THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
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It's difficult to know quite where to begin here, in the face of such overwhelming praise from so many satisfied readers. And yet over 600 being offered for sale from one penny perhaps speaks more eloquently of the book's appeal. It's not that it's badly written, just that it fails to illuminate Master Georgie's life. That after all should be its purpose, particularly where, as here, that person existed and at least one of the events described took place. The author is content to conjure up others to act as prisms, which would be a useful literary device if they illuminated the central figure, but instead we see him through a glass darkly. I may be in a minority of one, but it failed to live up to my expectations.
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Complex, moving, beautifully cratfed
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At first glance Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge suggests it might be quite a light book, an easy read, a period piece set in the mid-nineteenth century. This would be wrong. Master Georgie is no safe tale of country house manners, of marriages imagined by confined, embroidering young women. Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie is anything but a tale of such saccharine gentility.
Master Georgie is a surgeon and photographer, and the book is cast in six plates - photographic plates, not chapters. Death figures throughout. From start to finish morbidity crashes into the lives of the book's characters. We begin with Mr Moody, dead in a brothel bed, his host of minutes before in shock. Later we move to the Crimean War, where the carnage is graphic, extensive and apparently random. And even then individuals find their own personal ways of adding insult and injury to the suffering.
The book uses multiple points of view. We see things Master Georgie's way. Myrtle, an orphan he takes in, adds her perspective. The fussy geologist, Dr Potter, imprints his own version of reality. And still there are less than explained undercurrents, undeclared motives which affect them all. Thus, overall, Master Georgie is a complex and ambitious novel. Though it is set in a major war, the backdrop is never allowed to dominate. The characters experience the consequences of conflict and register their reactions, but we are never led by the nose trough the history or the geography of the setting.
But we also never really get to know these people. Myrtle, perhaps, has the strongest presence. She has a slightly jaundiced, certainly pragmatic approach to life. But even she finds the privations of wartime tough. Why the characters of Master Georgie are all so keen to offer themselves as support for the war effort is an aspect of the book that never fully revealed itself. And ultimately this was my criticism of Beryl Bainbridge's book. While the overall experience was both rewarding and not a little shocking, I found there was insufficient delineation between the characters and their differing motives. The beauty of the prose, however, more than made up for any shortcoming. The language created the mixed world of mid-nineteenth century politeness and juxtaposed this with the visceral vulgarities of soldiering and the general struggle of life. This rendered Master Georgie a complex, moving and quite beautiful book.
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A great achievement
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George Hardy, surgeon and photographer, sets of from Victorian England to do his patriotic duty in the Crimea. His tale his told by the people following him there: his (adoptive) sister Myrtle, the geologist Dr. Potter, and Hardy's photography-assistant Pompey Jones.
They all leave with their heads filled with newspaper-stories of gallant soldiers and heroes, and none of them is prepared for the harsh and cruel reality of warfare. The filth and misery of warfare will change them beyond recognition, and Bainbridge tells their story in haunting scenes.
Without a doubt one of the best novels I've read in a long time.
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Sensitive, moving story about love and loss
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The idea of writing this novel about a character, George Hardy, but confining its “voice” to the three people most close to him gives George, the person, an almost mystical air and at the same time is a very good device to reveal snippets of his life as the story progresses.
The three narrators are, predictably, very different and the events they describe often clash amusingly. Myrtle is the most reverential to George and it is through her voice we perceive the sensitivity of Bainbridge’s story- she is also the most sympathetic. Dr Potter provides the humour (at his own expense) that lightens an otherwise bleak situation. Finally, Pompey Jones is similar to Myrtle in his devotion but almost her rival in love- he also provides the first hand account of the battle scenes at the end of the book which are unfortunately the least interesting or polished part of the book.
Bainbridge infuses the book with ambiguities of sexuality that sit beside the harshness of the war very well. What is interesting is the amount of gore and unpleasantness that permeates the supposedly “prim” Victorian values of the characters.
By far superior to Every Man For Himself and deserves its Booker Prize nomination. The length of MG was a disappointment; however, at only just over two hundred pages long I felt it didn’t develop its characters as well as it could- especially having three different narrators. Also the conflict near the end didn’t have the dramatic tension or interest I thought it should. A fine novel but much too short.
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pictures of love and war
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i'm no great reader but found this book a 'special' one in the author's gift of depicting human ties to each other. The younger characters portrayed in the book for me seem the strongest and most interesting, though Master Georgie's character is unravelled well by the end of the book. While describing the horror of war in the book, the humaness of the characters give a colour to the story in the dark of war. Even though all the characters have their flaws there seems to be a heroism with the central characters that is beyond their facing of war. Beryl to me seems a master of sketching characters in this book.
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