C [Paperback]

Maurice Baring (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2001

Baring's homage to a decadent and carefree Edwardian age depicts a society as yet untainted by the traumas and complexities of twentieth-century living. With wit and subtlety a happy picture is drawn of family life, house parties in the country and a leisured existence clouded only by the rumblings of the Boer War. Against this spectacle Caryl Bramsley (the C of the title) is presented - a young man of terrific promise but scant achievement, whose tragic-comic tale offsets the privileged milieu.

Editorial Reviews

Review

...a brimful of talent of every kind, and there runs through everything he does a streak of real originality' -- J B Priestly

About the Author

Born in London in 1874, Maurice Baring was a man of letters, a scion of a family long prominent in the financial ventures of the British Empire. The son of the 1st Baron Revelstoke (a director of the Bank of England and a senior partner at Baring Bros.) he was educated at Eton and at Cambridge, and joined the diplomatic service in 1898. In 1904 he became a journalist and reported the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria; later he was a correspondent in Russia and Constantinople. He is credited with having discovered Chekov's work in Moscow and helping to introduce it to the West. Baring is remembered as a versatile, prolific and highly successful writer, who produced articles, plays, biographies, criticism, poetry, translations, stories and novels. He is regarded as a representative of the social culture that flourished in England before World War I, his work highly regarded to this day for the acute intimate portraits of the time.

Product Details

• Paperback: 612 pages
• Publisher: House of Stratus Ltd (January 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0755100891
• ISBN-13: 978-0755100897
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,423,882 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars "A man of culture, but not achievement", August 14, 2006

By 

A reader (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: C (Paperback)

"C." could be placed in the Bildungsroman category. We follow the protagonist, Caryl Bramsley, the unfortunately nicknamed "C.", from his childhood in an upper-class but financially precarious British family through a haphazard education as he drifts through schools, University, and various private tutors in and out of England.

The key development is that despite the boorish anti-intellectualism of his upbringing, "C." does develop a passion for literature, specifically poetry. His tragedy is that circumstances prevent this enthusiasm from developing into a vocation. Hence the apt characterization (provided on the back cover of my edition) of "C." as "a man of culture, but not achievement."

The novel loses dramatic strength as "C." grows older and enters into an arduously drawn-out dysfunctional romance with Leila Bucknell, a beautiful but fickle married woman. This is the book's weakest component.

Overall, "C." is an excellent portrayal of the aristocratic British milieu before World War I, but it is not a particularly absorbing story.

2.0 out of 5 stars Surprising, but not in a good way, June 9, 2008

By 

Peter S. Shenkin (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: C (Paperback)

It is astounding to me that the blithe spirit who wrote "A puppet show of memory" could have written this tiresome and depressing tale. Our hero finds himself torn between a spiritual love for a Catholic girl and a carnal love for a flirt. He makes the wrong choices throughout and dies having wasted his considerable literary talents. I have to read "C" as a moral tale, a warning or admonition occasioned by Baring's conversion to Catholicism late in life. "Puppet show" never moralizes; it just observes. There is no display in it of Baring's inner life; there are thoughts and beautifully evocative observations, but few personal or inner emotions are on display. One questions, reading it, whether Baring even has an inner life. The revelation of his conversion near the end comes as an unexplained surprise, and is revealed as dipassionately as everything else in the book. "C", on the other hand, is all about the tortured inner life of the protagonist, an inner life that one is surprised to learn that Baring can even imagine.