A great book, as long as you’re not a “just one more chapter before bed” kind of reader. Virginia Woolf will not demarcate bedtimes in her art, thank you very much!
(I’m such a snob. I hate movie tie-in editions, and this one also has a “reading guide” at the end.)
The story follows a meandering thread through an entire day, with a real-time effect similar to (brace yourself for wildly disparate comparisons) Ulysses and 24. Note: I have never seen 24. This may not be true. I assume “meandering” at least is very wrong. I think they spend most of the day torturing possible terrorists, which is not a large part the day for either Clarissa Dalloway or Leopold Bloom.
In post-World War I London, Clarissa Dalloway realizes that her life is silly and shallow, but goes through the motions and does what’s expected of her. It’s only through her interior thoughts that we learn anything about her desires and depths. A more cursory look at her actions would see a woman running errands to prepare for a dinner party. Instead, she’s ruminating about how she ended up where she is, and what she’s had to sacrifice, and whether it’s worth it.
Her husband, a stolid, practical man, is not nearly intelligent enough to keep her interested. He’s some kind of minor government official, with apparently no independent thoughts outside of parroting the party line.
With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes–one of the tragedies of married life. With a mind of her own, she must always be quoting Richard–as if one couldn’t know a tittle what Richard thought by reading the Morning Post of a morning!
But how could she swallow all that stuff about poetry? How could she let him hold forth about Shakespeare? Seriously and solemnly Richard Dalloway got on his hind legs and said that no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes.
(I haven’t seen The Hours. I don’t know if this is Mrs. Dalloway or some other character. But the expression is correct for just having heard someone say that decent men shouldn’t read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it’s like listening at keyholes.)
Side note: “He really got on his hind legs and said that…” sounds so incredibly modern to my ears. Mrs. Dalloway is one hundred years old, and I wouldn’t blink an eye if I scrolled past that exact quote on Reddit. I kind of want to incorporate it into my vocabulary.
Throughout the book, Virginia Woolf uses a technique to switch POV characters that I’ve never seen used in quite this way. If multiple characters perceive the same event, she uses that shared perception as a opportunity to jump into the other person’s thoughts. For example, we’re in the thoughts of a young woman on a bench in Regent’s Park. She sees a skywriting plane soar overhead and has an observation about it. A second observation about the plane follows, and then something about the narrator crossing the street between cars and suddenly we realize we’re now in the thoughts of a man walking just outside the park.
The effect is cinematic. Imagine a tight shot on a character’s face, then a pan up to a passing prop plane, then pan back down into a tight shot of a different character’s face. Really fun when it happens a novel!
World War I, recently over, casts a long shadow on all the characters in the book, whether they fought in it, hid in a colonial outpost to avoid it, or sat a home waiting for news. It was this massive, disruptive force in their lives and now it’s gone and they’re left scrabbling for meaning and purpose in a completely different, more mundane reality. Not everyone is able to do it.
I’ll leave with this beautiful passage, which doesn’t really fit with any of the topics above, but which makes me want to re-read The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. A character is sitting in Regent’s park, an oasis of the natural world with London all around, and reflects on nightfall letting her overlook all the obvious signs of civilization and pretend she’s in a world free of human contamination.
…at midnight, when all boundaries are lost, the country reverts to its ancient shape, as the Romans saw it, lying cloudy, when they landed, and the hills had no names and rivers wound they knew not where…
(Of course, pre-Roman Britain wasn’t free of human ‘contamination.’ But any effort to harken back to a better, more idyllic time is necessarily going to overlook facts.)