Cakes And Ale (1930)
The Sunday Age
Sunday March 7, 2004
Book review: CAKES AND ALE (1930), By Somerset Maugham
Cakes and Ale is the one novel by Somerset Maugham that Gore Vidal thinks can still stand up as literature. It's no discredit to this winding recapitulation of the quest for the truth about a Great Writer to say that this makes far more sense when you have completed it than it does most of the way through.
The novel is about a Hardy-like writer, Driffield, and the Maugham figure, Ashenden, who is approached to share his reminiscences about him.
Ashenden knew him when Ashenden was growing up in the country with his mild but mean-minded vicar uncle and his timid aunt. He was also captivated by Rosie, Driffield's first wife, with whom, much later, he has an affair.
Rosie is the centre of Cakes and Ale and the true key to what made the great novelist tick.
Cakes and Ale is a quiet novel that has a trick ending that is breathtaking and makes the reader re-evaluate everything that has gone before.
It manages to be an extraordinary, nearly Dostoevskian insight into the complexities of human character, of human characterisation and (for that reason) a brilliant stab at the genesis of how literature is made and how little it fits the decorous stories the world tells.
You can yawn through much of this book then gasp at the way the novel turns round to become such a thing of tears and of a laughter that is beyond tears. It is at the very least a ravishing performance by a master storyteller.
It may well be the novel of Maugham that is closest in form to the Maugham of the stories. It is, in the end, a much more powerful thing than its style and its atmospherics would suggest.
This is Maugham at his most apparently dove-grey mannered but it is actually him doffing his cap and kissing the dust to the honour not of the novels but the kind of emotional realities that might underlie Tess of the D'Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure.
© 2004 The Sunday Age
