Customer Reviews

EUSTACE AND HILDA

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Certainly the most complicated and complex set of charcters in literature. And that THE charcters count up to only two only serves to underline the essence of the book. The trilogy is basically an exploration of releationship between a very unforthcoming and rather narcisstic Eustace and the domineering Hilda. "Shrimp and the anemone" starts off the tale from their childhood and culminates with "Eustace and Hilda". Both are certainly doomed to disappointments - neither can look beyond the other. For all Hilda's success at the hospital, it is Eustace's guardian that she sees herself - moral as well as the economic guardian.
One never senses any feeling in Eustace to escape this bond.Rather he is as much a slave to Hilda as she wills all to be. As the story progresses towards an intriguing climax, the tables are turned as Hilda now becomes dependant on Eustace for her medication. Eustace gears up to it gamefully - and it is reeally the final chapters of the book which explore the relationship at a direct level.
All in all, it is a wondferful read. Recommended for those who love words and who do not mind a leisurely pace. A masterpiece !

I cannot imagine how I manged to go through college, a graduate program in English, and many years of teaching British literature without ever having read this book. The character development is excellent, and even when the characters are being aggravating (as they sometimes are), the reader truly cares about them and wants to see what happens next. I highly recommend this book to all fans of the well-crafted British novel. Furthermore, I recommend this novel to anyone who is interested in the ways, both healthy and unhealthy, that siblings interact.

Anita Brookner refers to this trilogy in her introduction to the NYRB edition as "a masterpiece," and it is quite clear from reading it that L.P. Hartley intended this as his artist's summa. The works are not as well known, however, as Hartley's THE GO-BETWEEN, and I think there is a reason for that: although the acccomplishments of the EUSTACE AND HILDA trilogy are genuine, it is not as polished a work as THE GO-BETWEEN. The principle problem with the trilogy is that almost all of the characters (including Hilda) exist only as they are perceived by the timid, pleasure-loving, and deeply narcissistic Eustace: thus they do not wholly "live" for us, and though Eustace himself seems quite real, he is so very sensitive that (to paraphrase Christopher Durang) you'd like to hit him. Eustace's fascination with the wealthy and with luxury inevitably bring to mind Marcel Proust, who clearly seems a model for Hartley's trilogy. The trilogy also seems modelled on Galsworthy and Meredith, however, and at times it makes for a very strange melange. It does have some fantastic set pieces, however, including Hilda's trip in the airplane with Dick Staveley and her later breakdown and its aftermath.

This trilogy traces the unhealthy relationship a brother and sister, Eustace and Hilda Cherrington, from childhood through young adulthood in early twentieth-century England.

Eustace is a weak-willed indolent creature, easily dominated and swayed by any stronger personality. He is perfect material for his elder sister Hilda, a forceful personality with a puritan streak a mile wide. Each needs the other's weakness to survive, Eustace because his ineffectualness needs an outside goad, and Hilda because she must have someone to exercize her will over.

It was fascinating to observe the social development of the characters. Eustace gradually becomes independent of Hilda, but she can't thrive without him. At the end of the book, Eustace is well on the road to maturity, not so much a case of arrested as delayed development. He has learned to face responsibilities, and become a man of action. There is even a hint of a possible future romance. It is left to conjecture if he would have fallen again under Hilda's sway, but the reader feels he would have had a good chance.

Hilda, while she initially appears more competent and effective, is unable to withstand the pressures of adult life, particularly adult sexuality. She cannot stand to be thwarted; to dominate and control is as necessary for her as air and water.

Eustace, while handicapped by his passivity, has several strokes of luck. Several people assist his development and have his best interests at heart. Stephen Hilliard, an Oxford classmate who becomes a lawyer, manages his financial affairs and helps steady his impulsive generosity. Lady Nelly, his Venetian hostess, encourages him to write a book. He is able to accept and integrate outside advice into his life and learns to view the world in shades of gray; for Hilda everything must always be black and white.

If you are interested in novels of psychological developement, I strongly recommend this book.

I read "Eustace and Hilda" over the course of a year, slowly moving through its 750 pages, with breaks between each part of the trilogy--and yet I have not been so sorry to finish a book in quite a long time. Months later, I can safely say that the trilogy as a whole is one of my all-time favorite novels, and I think most readers who prefer the subdued pacing of a psychological coming-of-age story will also fall in love with Hartley's portrait of this brother and sister.

Not that they themselves are easy to love. This is the type of novel that might cause a less empathetic reader to mutter, "I can't relate to any of the characters." Eustace is meek, almost pathetic; Hilda is manipulative and domineering. On the one hand, they are completely codependent (to use the modern term); on the other, they are bizarrely incompatible. Hilda both feeds and feeds off Eustace's insecurities, and more often than not Eustace confuses her bossiness for love--although, make no mistake, these two siblings do love each other. The lopsided dynamic between the pair makes up much of "The Shrimp and the Anemone," the first part of the trilogy, and, although there are moments that are endearing, even touching, there are also passages when any reader might want to give either of them (and especially Eustace) a good shake. But what also stands out is not only how funny and droll Hartley's prose can be but also how accurately he describes the experience of growing up: the ability of a child to turn the smallest slight into the greatest travesty, or to fantasize the most mundane observation (waves in a bathtub) as a spectacular event (a tidal wave of epic proportions).

I'm not the first reader to notice the Dickensian echoes that pervade this post-Victorian novel. But few seem to have written about the parallels between this trilogy and a major subplot in "David Copperfield." The similarities are both superficial and profound. In both works, the boy and girl are for the first time described together on the beach; she's bossy and beautiful, he's shy and insecure. An initially fearsome but ultimately saintly matron (Betsey Trotwood/Miss Fothergill) supplies the boy with the financial security otherwise unavailable to the protagonist of either novel. (Some readers have compared Miss Fothergill to Miss Havisham, from "Great Expectations," but I think this is mistaken; Miss Fothergill is neither farcical nor wholly tragic, and she has in mind Eustace's well-being--not a misanthropic desire for revenge).

Yet it is the second book, "The Sixth Heaven," that most reminds me of Dickens's great novel, in which a impressionable youth idolizes a rich, confident boy (Stavely/Steerforth), who is subsequently introduced by the younger friend to a sisterly figure (Emily/Hilda), with traumatic results--an outcome inevitable because of the unfortunate societal strictures that separate the classes. In each book, it must be said, the adoration of the young boy for his idol is platonically homoerotic, and the girl seems to be virtually a sacrifice for the boy's misplaced trust. That Eustace and Hilda's story is told entirely through Eustace's eyes, while Hilda's calamity occurs mostly off-stage, only adds to the likeness between the two works.

Much of the third book, simply called "Eustace and Hilda," takes place in Venice, where Eustace lives among the upper crust of the expatriate community and tries to fit in, with middling and muddling success. Even less "happens" than in the previous books; instead the action and tension move almost entirely to the internal monologues and runaway daydreams that occupy Eustace's mind. By now, Hartley here has added Henry James and E. M. Forster to the mix. But all these elements are mere echoes of his literary forebears; the trilogy is neither an update nor a homage nor a revisionist narrative, and the literary allusions never stand in the way of the intense psychological portraits he has created. Instead, this is Dickens and James and Forster filtered through the modernist prisms of Freud and Proust and Woolf, all of which come together as a unique, haunting, and heart-rending masterpiece. I can't wait to read it again in a few years.

. . . or some similar heading is rightly earned by L. P. Hartley's _Eustace and Hilda_. You will have read elsewhere that this trilogy is told largely through the point of view of Eustace Cherrington; he is the central consciousness, though an omniscient (all-knowing) narrator method is necessary to make the novel work as a whole, and to give the novel a sense of movement outside the mind of one person. Everyone enjoys reading _The Go-Between_ whose main character, Leo, is another sensitive young boy, and, in retrospect, Eustace seems to be a preparation for that novel, but E & H is an enduring element in British fiction. I didn't want this trilogy to end; from time to time, I would set it aside and read other novels so that I could ponder the fate of the Cherringtons.

There seems to be a debate as to whether or not the entire trilogy, _Eustace and Hilda_, (including _The Shrimp & the Anemone_, _The Sixth Heaven_ and _E & H_) can be called a masterpiece. Novel One is an outright masterpiece, partly because Eustace is still a child at the end, and as a result, the novel has no awkward life-changes to negotiate. We meet all the main characters, Mr. Cherrington and his sister, Aunt Sarah, the housekeeper and Eustace's confidante, Minney, as well as the wealthy Staveleys, the adventurous Steptoes, and Miss Fothergill. And there is Hartley's evocation of the Norfolk coast, the seaside village, and the dark woods of the Anchorstone Hall mansion. (Hartley has that quality of all great British novelists: the skill to evoke the darkly romantic countryside.) In volume one, we also discover the enduring themes: the effects of money on human identity and a hint of the sexual confusion to come in adulthood. I'm not giving anything away if I say that money solves some problems and creates others. Also in the first volume, Hartley hints that repressed sexuality will move the plot in volume two and three. Early on, Eustace goes on a paper-chase with Nancy, and Hilda turns down an opportunity to go horseback riding with Dick Staveley; both dramas burn in the minds of Hilda and Eustace and color their lives. (I don't want to give anything away.)

If novels two and three of the trilogy are not clear-cut masterpieces it might be because the classic realist text was no longer possible after World War II (the novel of clear, simple, unambiguous action), but also because it's a novelist's minefield when the main characters go through those horrible years of identity formation--from age twelve to twenty-five. But Hartley is an unqualified genius in the way he takes the potentially banal Freudian interpretations of the 1930s and `40s and makes then into art. If consistency and comprehensibility of the plot, and believability of character, constitute a masterwork then the sum of _Eustace and Hilda_ is just that: finely orchestrated genius.

There are episodes in which Eustace will daydream and fantasize--presaging magic realism--and it's a quite believable. Moreover, the total meaning of E & H is completely acceptable, if sad and regrettable. The sections set in Venice with Lady Nelly Staveley are a feast for the imagination--and Eustace has the soul of an artist. For some readers, Hilda might be a little too controlling and dominating to be believable, but the pieces of the puzzle were set up early in the novel when she was fourteen and Eustace about ten. It's important to note that they have an infant sister, Barbara, who represents the "normal" human development of the time: love of jazz and dancing plus early romance and marriage. It seems that Hilda and Eustace were thrown together because their mother died young, and insecurity and mutual influence would result; in addition, Aunt Sarah and Minney want Hilda and Eustace to remain children--unfortunately believable in people who fear change.

The scenes at Oxford University were a delight to read, and when I realized that most of volume two and three would take place in Venice, I was thrilled. I don't understand reviewers who recommend that we pass up Eustace and Hilda. Besides, there is nothing like a solid British sentence, and Hartley's have the cadence of poetry and the arc of drama. Rest in peace, Leslie. And thank you, again, to NYRB Classics; the book cover illustration suggests the theme of "the tomb of our greatest desires."

A friend gave me this book for my birthday, extolling the virtues of the writing. At first I thought the writing wasn't so much the thing as the delicate, nuanced understanding of character -- in particular of the sibling main characters. But as the book (really a trilogy published in one volume) progressed, I began to appreciate the writing itself. In the intro, Anita Brookner describes the writing as Jamesian, and I guess as a dissection of class distinctions and the difficulties and intricacies thereof, that's apt -- but I think in terms of delineation of character and subtleties of mood, it's more like Virginia Woolf.

My friend also promised that nothing happens in this book, which would make it appealing to me. This is not quite true, although most of the plotty stuff is in the last 1/4 or so when Hilda falls in love with a rakish and unsuitable aristocrat, is spurned and suffers nervous paralysis, at which point Eustace rushes home from summering in Venice to nurse her.

The central metaphor of the book is a shrimp being devoured by an anemone -- and the fatal interdependence of the two (without the shrimp, the anemone starves). Hilda has dominated poor, delicate Eustace since birth but for the brief period of her love affair and his time in Venice. After her cure, she resumes her domineering ways. Eustace hopes to break free, but in the last image he dreams of placing his finger in an anemone's "mouth" where he can't find a shrimp to sustain it.

The book is essentially tragic and a times very painful to read -- Hilda in the name of morality is cruel to poor Eustace. But it is also very funny, particularly the aristocratic characters at Oxford (Antony) and in Venice (Jasper Bentwich).

Anita Brookner, in her introduction to Hartley's trilogy, makes much of a comparison between Hartley and Henry James. This is at once apt and inapt. It is apt in that James is certainly the novelist one is reminded of most by this trilogy. But it is terribly inapt in that James is much the better writer and his works are truly "masterpieces", a claim Brookner makes for this work which simply won't hold literary water. Hartley certainly holds his own with James in mere description of place, and thus one is reminded at different points of James's most popular novel (A Portrait of A Lady) and his best (The Ambassadors).-But all similarity ends here.-There are none of the depths of character insight of which James is such a master, nor, really....anything else to remind one of James. Just page after page of-description-that leads to one cul-de-sac after another (a good example is the chapter "The Larva" or "ghost" in Latin, which seems to have been written with absolutely no purpose in mind, or perhaps a forgotten one). Yes, there is an overall plot. But one doesn't come away with any insights into the human condition in the way one does from a James novel, or any "masterpiece" for that matter.

The overall effect of this novel and of the writing is a sort of slippage, that the author doesn't really know where he's going with Eustace or Hilda, and that they don't know where they're going either, and the reader is left wearily turning page after page waiting for some, any sort of insight.-Perhaps to say this is to equate Hartley, in some sense, with Eustace himself-Everything is sinking or slipping, much like Venice, where much of the book occurs. There is a passage which describes this quite nicely when Eustace (typically) just happens to find himself amidst a "lustral" bathing:

"He felt his identity flowing out of him, to be soaked up heedlessly by the grains of sand or parcelled out in fragments of a thousandth among all the figures standing or sprawling round him."p.533

This is very much what reading this book is like. Hartley does a much better job with The Go-Between, which I would recommend to all prospective readers rather than this meandering book.-Or, if you really are in search of a "masterpiece" of this sort, Henry James's The Ambassadors will not leave you sinking, dear reader.

Anita Brookner misleadingly introduces this volume as a "masterpiece," "so expertly written that one hardly notices the skill which informs it."

Let us examine these extravagant claims!

For starters, the story is dull. Stories, rather: the volume houses three novels, all of which follow the life of Eustace Cherrington from childhood to [flips to end of book] death, apparently. I managed to read the first novel, The Shrimp and the Anemone, where anyone who has a sibling will appreciate the relationship between Eustace and Hilda (to a point); and have now got to the middle of the second novel, The Sixth Heaven. But at this point the book has become unbearably boring.

Eustace, rather than being adventurous and interesting, is shy and polite. This was tolerable in the first novel as he was only a child, but by the second novel (now at university) he is timid, compromising, and irritating. He mopes continually. I've flipped through the third novel, Eustace and Hilda, and apparently Eustace is living in Venice among the aristocracy while tryingt to write a novel.

So much for the story.

As for the prose, these books are so laboriously written that one immediately notices the "skill" that informs them. The reader is left in no doubt as to Hartley's verbosity. Apparently he was a literary critic, and while such dense exposition might serve in an essay or review, it causes one to slug through his fiction.

"Henry James would have appreciated the unhurried pace and the masterly certitude with which L.P. Hartley conducts his novel."

Quite possibly, although I doubt it's to either James's or Hartley's (or Brookner's) credit. The only James novel I've read was The Tragic Muse, and that was only because one of the characters (the only interesting one, it happens) was based on Oscar Wilde. Insert "arrogant aimlessness" for "unhurried pace and masterly certitude."

"The Edwardian amplitude of the narrative is more than substitute for any crudeness which our more superficial sensibilities have come to expect."

For an octogenarian (which Brookner is), "Edwardian amplitude" amounts to conservative padding. Nothing less from someone writing in the '40s, but Brookner appears desperate by making these excuses for the book.

"So close has been [E&H's] bond that neither is quite able to survive without the other, and the reader accepts this as the only just interpretation."

The reader rejects Brookner's interpretation and instead sees E&H's co-dependence as annoying.

"One closes the book with a feeling of profound sadness, of regret not only for Eustace and Hilda but for the beautiful literary undertaking that is now ended," she writes.

Halfway through the second novel, I closed the book with a feeling of profound joy, of relief for the tedious literary undertaking that I (as opposed to the timid Eustace) forced myself to end.

An aging and privileged literary critic, Hartley discovered he had so much spare time that he might as well inflict his dull fiction on the world. Brookner, who "retired from professional life" in 1988 to devote her time to writing novels, has gone a similar route.

Give it a miss. Please.