This novel took some effort to read, including two abortive starts over (I think) three years. It's one of the Wilkie Collins 'Big Four', along with 'The Woman In White', 'No Name' and 'The Moonstone', and is big on many levels. For one thing, my copy was six hundred and eighty pages long, excluding notes and introduction, and split into six sections. The narrative shifts from third person to first person via diary entries, moves across several protagonists, and fundamentally changes in its very nature several times. If it fully worked, then it would be a masterpiece, but it doesn't fully work and so becomes something that might charitably be called a bit of a mess.
The chief problem may be that the various sections work well within themselves but not with each other, specifically fouling the novel's internal consistency. On the other hand, perhaps it's the sheer convolutedness of the narrative that is the problem, it being founded on the coincidence of two men being identically named Allen Armadale, and also being the sons of two men named Allen Armadale. Perhaps it's a good idea to talk about the plot, but it might take several thousand words...
Before the main narrative, an Allen Armadale is murdered by his cousin Allen Armadale, the latter of whom leaves a letter for his son on his deathbed. The sins of the fathers threaten to wreak punishments on the sons, via a prophetic dream and the machinations of a rogue lady and adventuress called Lydia Gwilt. In 1866, the term 'adventuress' was not a flattering one and concealed a multitude of crimes, and Lydia Gwilt had not stinted in her previous career. Upon her entry into the narrative, the whole story steadily swings behind her to the point that it literally becomes her diary. Were she to succeed in marrying one Armadale, the poor one, and killing the other in order to pose as his widow and gain his money, she would be one of the greatest and most well constructed villains in literary history, but instead she falls in love and we get something else entirely. Is her ultimate, if terminal, redemption the redemption of the novel or does the zigzag nature of the epic defeat that purpose? It's hard to say.
'The Woman In White' and 'The Moonstone' are undoubted classics and the crown of the Wilkie Collins canon. 'Armadale' is okay, and fits into the Big Four, but it's nowhere near as consistent. Perhaps its lasting influence is in Lydia Gwilt herself, a tortured female antagonist who sets a precedent for feminine villainy not to be forgotten.
Read 'Armadale' if you dare. It has good points, and you need only struggle through the overly portentous and forbidding prophetic portion in order to reach more enjoyable times, before another shift drifts you away once again.
O.
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