It’s hard for me to have all too much to say about a book which for me only woke up in its last 50 pages. There are not many novels I’ve read this dense with inactivity. It’s very rare that even a bad novel will bore me, yet this one did so exceedingly.
Shockingly unshocking twists and reveals make the stories thread twist and turn upon itself before eventually unravelling into the most happily ever after, everyone gets what suits and deserves them best, ending possible. This is also a very common way for Dickens’ endings to go, only difference is his stories get there in interesting ways, and after spending time with his characters and their lives you feel like they’ve earnt the right to one.
The satire doesn’t do much to help it either, at the end of the day this is still a book about profoundly boring people and lives which only consist of yearly incomes, advantageous marriages and correct manners. Just because Austen lets you know she is also aware of this through subtle pricks at this every now and then, really doesn’t improve the book by much for me.
Every character in this book is an archetype, and each one has better examples of characters who are that same archetype but just simply done better in other books I’ve read. Maybe because of this it feels like there really is no love in this book, only obligation. This might be the very point that Austen is trying to make about the society of that time and class, but even if so that doesn’t make it any better for me, it’s still not something I care for or want to read about whatever the intention may be.
I know this all seems very negative, this is obviously a classic piece of literature, otherwise there’s no way it would still be read 200 years after publication, it just doesn’t have much of what I personally read for and enjoy. The prose is always solid, and the book can be quite funny at times, most often in Austen’s constant little narratorial remarks poking fun at some characters hypocrisy, ridiculousness or some other personal blight, its just that for me it more often than not gets lost in the tiresomeness of it all.
2/5
(I’m definitely going to come back to Austen at some point this year though, either with Emma or Northanger Abbey as I got an omnibus volume with all 3 novels. Hopefully one of those will have a bit more life to them.)
by marqueemoonchild