Reviews for The Phantom 'Rickshaw

The average rating for The Phantom 'Rickshaw based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-11-09 00:00:00 Mark Calamusa A small sampling of Maugham's writings that attempts to showcase his novelistic, short story writing and travel writing capabilities. It is difficult to select the optimal pieces for a single book from an oeuvre that spans 78 books, but the editor, Jeffrey Meyers, makes a valiant effort here. Given that the selections spans a 25-year period in the author's career beginning from his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, his style evolves during the collection; from the ham-fisted Victorian omniscient narrator who knows everything and interferes constantly by making his observations and thoughts known on various issues and who pops into the heads of his characters indiscriminately, to the detached writer who merely observes and records actions and dialogue and makes the reader infer the lay of the land. As a novelist Maugham was concerned with social and political issues of the day. He rebelled against a rigid upper middle class that was as ignorant as the lower classes with its regimented domestic practices and habits, with its sense that God had entrusted Britain to rule the world, and who believed that sex and passion were to be hidden under the voluminous skirts of propriety and duty. Every male had to enlist in the army to be worth something and even then there were hierarchies within the enlisted: cavalry ranked above infantry. These issues are covered in detail in the only novel presented in its entirety in this collection, Hero, in which the returning Victoria Cross-winning soldier has been enlightened on the killing fields of Africa and sees through the sham of his ordered life back in England. When he rebels against it, including breaking off a pre-ordained marriage to his long suffering fiancée, all hell breaks loose and the frailties of the Empire are exposed. Only death can heal the rift and return things to normal for everyone else. In Mrs. Craddock, Maugham expands on this theme, inverting the role of the hero to a woman and giving impetus to later novels that came in this vein, notably D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. The weak hero theme plays out also in his autobiographical novel, Of Human Bondage, where the hero is subject to humiliation in his younger years; I wondered whether Philip Carey's club foot, the source of most of his persecution was a proxy for Maugham's homosexuality that had to be kept secret in those Victorian days. Some of his novels are modelled on real life personalities. In Moon & Sixpence, Maugham conveys the final years of Gaugin in Tahiti, in the character of mad painter Strickland who gives up everything, including a promising medical career and a knighthood, to paint, paint and paint until leprosy eats away at him. Strickland is imprisoned by his passion, and his passion is to create beauty. The painter leaves instructions that his final work is to be burned, but his remaining work is recognized after his death and confers genius status upon its creator. The steady decline of the painter is wonderfully constructed and the irony of how the news of his death is received by Strickland's English family is a bitter condemnation of colonial Britain's stiff upper lip. In The Magician, Maugham models Oliver Haddo on the real life Satanist Aleister Crowley. Haddo is a striking character: insulting, bragging, and seducing openly with no thought to the anger and hatred he stirs in his wake. Haddo is intent on creating human life, but his evil deeds catch up with him; the finale falls into the realm of magic realism. By far the most polished work is The Trembling of a Leaf: Stories of the South Sea Islands, but I will not touch on it here as I have reviewed this collection in its entirety on this forum under the title of Rain and Other Stories of the South Pacific. The final pieces relate to Maugham's travels. The first, "The Land of the Blessed Virgin: Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia" is an account of a younger Maugham full of daring who travels alone on horseback through bandit country armed with a loaded pistol (which he never has to use). His aim is to do a circuit around Seville, visiting remote villages. The area is barren and arid and his companions are mainly commercial travellers he meets in isolated rest houses; he is told that the only work for young men is the priesthood or the bull ring. He is open to other stories of the Andalusians who oppose the Spanish involvement in Cuba, who insist that Spain was never conquered, and remind Maugham that even Admiral Nelson was given a hard time by the Spanish. His return trip is drenched in an unending downpour and Maugham concludes that man is powerless under the forces of nature. In "On a Chinese Screen", we see a mature Maugham meeting with and observing the peculiar personalities in China, both expatriates and locals. Without telling, he shows us what time away from home has done to westerners. The last character piece "The Vice Consul" is particularly impactful where we see an American embassy official attending a local execution; his reaction at the expatriate club afterwards sums up the man and his predicament. There is more to Maugham's work than this selection. But it is an executive summary of the work of a great writer who straddled the 19th and 20th centuries and who continued to hold audiences through novels, short stories, travelogues, stage and screen-plays, essays and reportage, one who was able to adapt to the times and stay current during his lifetime despite the tragedies and dark secrets that dogged him.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-13 00:00:00 Donald Holland i was thrilled with this book. With a trip into Rajasthan coming up, I remembered that Kipling had made a journey of investigation there back in 1888. At that time Rajasthan was not part of British India, with its careful administration but was much wilder, ruled by Indian princes. There, young twenty-two-year old Rudyard couldn't rely on any special treatment. One night he got left on the side of the road in bitter cold , when the mail tonga he was travelling in damaged a wheel. The mail carriers would have left him there till the next mail passed but he sat on the mailbags and refused to be parted from them. These reports, sent back to his newspaper in Allahabad took me into a lost world, rife with alarms and amazements. Sad to haave finished it.