Stephen Hayes reviewed Adam Bede by George Eliot (Everyman's library ;)
None
4 stars
It's a love story.
It's set in the fictional English county of Loamshire at the end of the 18th century, which is some kind of rustic paradise until things start going wrong about halfway through the book. Unlike Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, whose romance novels are peopled with the landed gentry and their urban equivalents, this one is set among the yeoman class.
The book has been on our shelves forever, and I've been meaning to read it some day but kept putting it off, partly because of things I'd read about George Eliot, and partly because of plot summaries I'd read. Reading plot summaries can be a bad idea. It made it sound to simple, and a 600 page novel with such a simple plot must be boring, mustn't it, with all that padding?
But Eliot's descriptions of country life, though perhaps too idyllic, are part of the …
It's a love story.
It's set in the fictional English county of Loamshire at the end of the 18th century, which is some kind of rustic paradise until things start going wrong about halfway through the book. Unlike Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, whose romance novels are peopled with the landed gentry and their urban equivalents, this one is set among the yeoman class.
The book has been on our shelves forever, and I've been meaning to read it some day but kept putting it off, partly because of things I'd read about George Eliot, and partly because of plot summaries I'd read. Reading plot summaries can be a bad idea. It made it sound to simple, and a 600 page novel with such a simple plot must be boring, mustn't it, with all that padding?
But Eliot's descriptions of country life, though perhaps too idyllic, are part of the interest of the book, and she makes the characters sound interesting. I don't know how accurate her description of early Methodists is, but she probably knew several of them personally and perhaps some of her description is based on their recollections.
It's when the action starts that the plot holes appear. The reader is kept ignorant of somethings, which is a common device in fiction, but when the characters themselves appear to be ignorant, the suspension of disbelief gets a little strained. At one point there is a rather improbable Deus ex Machina, but it's still a good read.
