Customer Reviews

C

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"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.

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.