The American Book

Are you the kind of person who enjoys fast-paced melodrama? Fortified castles where dreadful deeds are carried out at midnight? A beautiful heroine who is destined to be buried alive? Evil villains straight out of a gothic romance? No?

Perhaps you are instead the kind of reader who prefers a more sedate narrative full of realistic depictions of everyday life. If you are, you share a trait with Christopher Newman, the American of the title. Though his story is set in the 1860s, Newman is a modern man who would never be caught dead inside the pages of a Gothic romance. Dramatic heroines given to extravagant displays of passion don't interest him, nor do flirtatious or hysterical characters. In fact, he rarely reads novels of any kind. He is practical rather than romantic; he likes new inventions, things that make life faster, easier and brighter; things like trains, lifts, electric lighting. Dark and gloomy castles aren't really his thing.

But though he favours the modern and the innovative, Newman is quite simple in his personal tastes, and especially in the way he expresses himself. While traveling through Europe visiting the many magnificent monuments to be found there, the brief comments he pencils into the margins of his guidebooks summarise his reactions perfectly: "Wherever you find a scratch or a cross, or a 'Beautiful!' or a 'So true!' or a 'Too thin!' [in the guidebooks] you may know that I have had a sensation of some sort or other."

So we know early on that Newman doesn't waste time on extravagances of expression. When he meets the beautiful Comtesse de Cintre for the first time, his reaction is characteristically low-key : She was pleasing, she was interesting; he had opened a book and the first lines held his attention.

Yet his muted reactions don't equal a lack of feeling, he simply prefers to keep some feelings private. He is a man who knows the value of silence. He is surrounded by characters who love to expound. A few of them know what they are talking about, others, perhaps not. Newman stands out among them for the careful way he uses words, and when he is silent, it doesn't mean he disapproves or that he has nothing to say, just that he is wiser than the rest.

His quiet wisdom makes him a daunting opponent for anyone who tries to thwart his plans for the future: if he were to take the trouble he might, as he phrases it, break all the windows (I really liked the way HJ juxtaposes phrases reflecting Newman's New World origins with the sedate language of the narrative).

Newman's plans for the future aren't hugely ambitious however. Making money has always been easy for him so wealth is not something he covets. Neither does he have any social aspirations; he is oblivious to class distinctions and is not intimidated by aristocratic families with 'noble' lineages. He measures people by their behavior rather than by the deeds of their ancestors, and he has very high standards for his own behavior. In short, everything he says and does reveal him to be a thoroughly noble character, though he will always be plain 'Mr' Newman.

About half way through this book, Newman's nobility and patience suffer a terrible test, and this reader's patience along with him. If you glance at the updates, it might seem that I gave up at page 225. I didn't stop reading however, but I did stop posting updates; there were simply no more passages that struck me as memorable. Newman too is out of his natural habitat in the second half of the narrative. His sense of both fairness and fun are no longer called for. He finds himself among people he can't recognise and situations he can't negotiate. It was too strange and too mocking to be real; it was like a page torn out of a romance, with no context in his own experience.

Yes, you've guessed it. Newman finds himself trapped in a gothic melodrama, complete with fortified castles, emprisoned heroines and evil villains. There is nothing to be done but get through it as quickly as possible. And so we both did.