Book Review - Of Human Bondage

TITLE: Of Human Bondage

AUTHOR: W. Somerset Maugham

PUBLISHER: Currently in the Public Domain

PUBLICATION DATE: 1915

GENRE: Autobiographical novel, Classic, in the top 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

FROM AMAZON: It is the story of Philip Carey, an orphan eager for life, love, and adventure. After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as a would-be artist, Philip settles in London to train as a doctor. And that is where he meets Mildred, the loud but irresistible waitress with whom he plunges into a formative, tortured, and masochistic affair which very nearly ruins him.

THE REVIEW:

I like to read a book, then look up reviews about it and learn about the author afterward. This additional knowledge always colors how I see a piece of work. 

Of Human Bondage is my first classic for the year. It’s long by today’s standards: 728 pages compared to 300 - 350 for something recently published. There are lots of words, plenty of introspection, and description. The first half of the book was slow going, the second half more exciting.

This is a coming-of-age story, a hero’s journey, a philosophical quest for the meaning of life. It explores human existence. We experience the exuberance and self-importance of youth, with all its unending possibilities. We fall into the depths of despair involved in obsessions and how we are our own worst enemies. Thank the gods it had a happy ending for Phillip, but he worked at it.

Technically, one of the things I liked was that Maugham writes from Phillip’s point of view throughout, then he changes to someone else’s point of view in the very last sentence of the chapters.

While all of the characters were driven by passion and sexual appetites, it is never explicitly spoke of and so subtly alluded to you could easily miss it.

Mildred is a peach, not.

The story really makes you think about your choices, passions, and obsessions, how sometimes we really can’t help ourselves even when we know we are making a huge mistake. Life is sad, meaningless, random, exciting, worthwhile, and ultimately, the only thing we have to do.

Maugham drew heavily from his own life to create the character of Phillip. His parents died young, leaving him in the care of an emotionally cold and cruel uncle; he became a doctor and worked in the slums of London; he lived and studied in Germany and France; he had a physical issue that caused people to make fun of him. Unlike Phillip, he was able to quite doctoring and write full-time because of his popularity and success.

Maugham seems to have been driven by his passions. He was married (breaking up the first marriage of his wife) and had affairs with many men and women. At the end of his life, he considered himself homosexual.

Maugham did not believe in God, or an afterlife, which shows in this story. He found human suffering proof that God did not exist.

He wrote twenty novels, Of Human Bondage, is considered his masterpiece, dozens of short stories in collections and periodicals, over twenty published plays and more unpublished, along with fifteen works of non-fiction.

This is one story where the essence stays with you and drives you to think about your place in the universe. Well worth your time.

Up Next: CIRCE by Madeline Miller