THE PAINTED VEIL by W. Somerset Maugham

Reviewed by Andrew Seal

When I picked up a copy of The Painted Veil to review, I asked a friend of mine what she thought of W. Somerset Maugham.

“He’s a very one book sort of man, I think,” she said. “There’s Of Human Bondage, and then, well, what is there?”

I suppose this attitude isn’t atypical, at least among the current arbiters of the literary canon and among those English-major acolytes (like my friend and I) who pay attention to ponderous old fools like the Modern Library and whatnot.

I am, however, glad to say that Maugham is not a one book man and, upon further reading, may not even be a two book man. Of Human Bondage is an undeniable masterpiece, but The Painted Veil is a fine book as well. It is a keen reminder in a literary era obsessed with the hysterical realism of Pynchon and his disciples that a writer needs to be neither in your face nor over the top to fashion a good book, that an author is as much an observer as she is a creator, and that a book’s simplicity does not automatically preclude the breadth of vision for which more complex narratives often strain.

If I compare Maugham’s craftsman-like efficiency with Pynchon’s over-abundance of, well, everything, it is because I have been reading The Painted Veil and Pynchon’s new Against the Day simultaneously. Although I am enjoying Against the Day immensely, it is a bit of a relief to, every once in awhile, turn to Maugham’s mixture of precision and concision and enter a much simpler, though oddly more engaging, world peopled by Maugham’s rich characters and plotted competently and steadily.

Those characters are Walter and Kitty Fane, a young but mismatched couple; Charlie Townshend, the BMOC (Big Man on Colony) at Hong Kong; Waddington, a delightful drunk and minor British official; and a host of very devout French nuns. The plot, a Graham Greene-like spiritualized potboiler, is set thus: Kitty, a ravishing beauty, scorns numerous marriage proposals and, fearing that her sister will marry before her, weds the drab bacteriologist Walter. Walter whisks her away to Hong Kong, where he’s doing the empire’s work looking at Eastern germs. Kitty, not getting enough action from her doting but priggish husband, finds in Townshend, a polo-playing, backslapping type fellow, all that she can handle. Walter finds out and orders her to accompany him on a mission to quell a raging cholera epidemic inland. Townshend, ever the cad, abandons her to the plague and her husband. Inland, in the fictional city of Mei-Tan-Fu, Kitty finds herself working alongside the pious yet strangely droll nuns, and discovers a new depth in her life, or something along those lines.

A typical tale of a fallen(ish) woman’s redemption, but the devil is in the details, as they say, and Maugham is devilish in his attention to personal detail. Maugham is never obsessive in his characterization, but rather supremely economical, illuminating his characters in just enough light to cast the shadows of a much greater depth. While a great deal of British literature of and especially before this period excels at conveying emotion from behind tightened lips, Maugham also gives us the added entertainment of showing some cracks in the Victorian/Edwardian veneer of total propriety. He excels at the ‘behind closed doors’ dialogue, even if not all of his words sound like something any of us would ever consider saying.

There are drawbacks to the novel, however. Maugham has never been known for being very good at evoking a sense of place, which is ironic given his association, both biographically and authorially, with exotic locales. He certainly does almost nothing with China here. His descriptions of anything “Oriental” are, for the most part, efforts at finding new ways to call it mysterious or inscrutable. Curiously, “mysterious” and “inscrutable” also describe the nuns who flit about the novel, but, when talking about the Chinese, these words are also linked to terms like “subhuman” and “animalistic.” Maugham and his white characters exist in a sort of suspension between repulsion toward and “charitable” affection for the Chinese, and this suspension probably prevents Maugham from creating a sense of setting or from developing the crudely abbreviated exploration of Daoism that crops up occasionally. I’ll be nice and say that Maugham’s appropriation of Daoism is, while briefly poetic, considerably undereducated. In general, The Painted Veil is a great example of using a foreign setting just for “local color.”

And while Maugham has always been very popular fare for film adaptations (48 feature films in English alone, according to Maugham’s biographer Jeffrey Meyers), The Painted Veil fails to imprint itself cinematically in general, and not just because of the lack of picturesque detail. There just aren’t many scenes which seem like bits from a movie. A new film adaptation of Veil, starring Ed Norton and the dazzlingly talented Naomi Watts, worked around this problem quite self-consciously. The book just isn’t very Hollywood, and, for once, that’s not meant as a compliment for the complexities of the written word. Maugham avoided a few very interesting plot and character developments that the new film apparently has taken, developments which, by many accounts, make the film even better than the book.

But the book itself is well worth a read. It is a great reminder of what a book sounds like without being burdened by the bells and whistles of brilliance and precocity. It’s not long, it moves quickly, in short chapters, and, while the spiritual impact which Maugham may have hoped for doesn’t entirely connect, it is quite moving. Kitty Fane is a grand character, and it does say quite a bit about humanity, if that is not too leadenly grand a comment. The title refers to a poem by Shelley:

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,–behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it–he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love,
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

Believe me when I say that the ambivalence of the poem is reflected very well in the novel, but it is certainly more magnanimous toward life and a great deal less obscure. Maugham is a fine author, a great writer, and, most surprisingly, a subtle thinker, and even if the book is not as deft at dealing with large issues like the meaning of life, forgiveness, and love as I might have hoped, it does not fold under their weight, which is always an accomplishment.