Bibliography
May. 30th, 2012 01:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilySinister Street - Compton Mackenzie
This is a two-volume whopper from 1913/1914 that turned up in the biography of Evelyn Waugh that I read recently. It is a lengthy and meditative exploration of a young man's early years, finishing in his early twenties, that seeks to depict the pressures and forces that shape his character in this foundational period. The early years particularly struck me with the richness and luxury of the descriptive language Mackenzie uses, really sensuous stuff that lingers on the mental palette. The protagonist, Michael Fane, is the illegitimate son of a member of the British nobility who dies in war just before he goes up to Oxford. He reads modern history despite his prep school's desire to make him a classics man; once he graduates, he pursues the delusion that he must marry a young woman of (shall we say) problematic reputation with whom he had a dalliance when he was much younger. She, however, lets him down, and he repairs to Rome, where we leave him considering his next move.
His sister Stella also plays a prominent role in the novel, and Michael's attitude to her and the other characters who are significant in his life (like his mother, his governess, his school friend Alan) is a fascinating chart of the development of a young man's intellectual and emotional maturity. Now, to what extent this is actually typical of the period and how much is Mackenzie's invention is a question that I don't feel qualified to comment on, but I certainly had a much more developed sense of the role of childhood and a child's interior life than I think I've ever had before. This is one of those novels that used to be extremely popular and now seems to have fallen out of favour; I think its massive scope (apparently there are three sequels) is probably unfashionable. But I think Mackenzie deserves to be rediscovered.
This is a two-volume whopper from 1913/1914 that turned up in the biography of Evelyn Waugh that I read recently. It is a lengthy and meditative exploration of a young man's early years, finishing in his early twenties, that seeks to depict the pressures and forces that shape his character in this foundational period. The early years particularly struck me with the richness and luxury of the descriptive language Mackenzie uses, really sensuous stuff that lingers on the mental palette. The protagonist, Michael Fane, is the illegitimate son of a member of the British nobility who dies in war just before he goes up to Oxford. He reads modern history despite his prep school's desire to make him a classics man; once he graduates, he pursues the delusion that he must marry a young woman of (shall we say) problematic reputation with whom he had a dalliance when he was much younger. She, however, lets him down, and he repairs to Rome, where we leave him considering his next move.
His sister Stella also plays a prominent role in the novel, and Michael's attitude to her and the other characters who are significant in his life (like his mother, his governess, his school friend Alan) is a fascinating chart of the development of a young man's intellectual and emotional maturity. Now, to what extent this is actually typical of the period and how much is Mackenzie's invention is a question that I don't feel qualified to comment on, but I certainly had a much more developed sense of the role of childhood and a child's interior life than I think I've ever had before. This is one of those novels that used to be extremely popular and now seems to have fallen out of favour; I think its massive scope (apparently there are three sequels) is probably unfashionable. But I think Mackenzie deserves to be rediscovered.
