Customer Reviews

Master Georgie: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

At first, I was going to tick Beryl Bainbridge off for writing too well, too literary. I thought it nonsense that an illiterate girl in nineteenth century Liverpool could never write such exquisite prose as evidenced in this novel, and that this was a case of the authorial voice being too strong. As it happened, I couldn't have been more wrong. This novel is narrated by the close acquaintances of 'Master Georgie' (although some are closer than others), starting with the illiterate Myrtle. Immediately we are drawn into the action, as this sequence of a photograph being taken will resound throughout the novel. 'Master Georgie' is incredibly subtle, and it is only by looking back over it that you begin to appreciate that this is the most suitable of beginnings. Here is where Myrtle begins on her road to becoming a lady. And what an unsavory road it is, as Myrtle's help is initially required to cover up the manner in which George Hardy's father has died, and leads to the bloody battlefields of the Crimea. Also assisting with the cover-up is the duck-boy and street urchin, Pompey Jones and the pompous Dr. Potter, whose narrations are by far the best. George Hardy himself is an ambiguous figure, seen only through the eyes of others. It may be a fault that we never really get to know him. This is a novel of cameras, carnality, and carnage. The dreadful shadow of history is cast upon it, with the famous charge of the Light Brigade lightly alluded to. One almost expects to run into a lady with a lamp at every corner, but fortunately, Bainbridge avoids this excess. She takes events frozen in time, such as the front cover's photograph, and brings them into life and death, and maybe even beyond. The camera never lies... Or does it? Bainbridge fervently burrows into the psyche of characters, enabling them to bring about apparitions vivid enough to be captured by film. In my mind's eye, I see Bainbridge pouring over ancient photographs from the Crimea, trying to put names to faces and to see if she could walk around in their bloody shoes. She succeeds. If I'd have been on 1998's Booker panel, I know I would have placed Bainbridge before McEwan. And the reason wouldn't have the desire to give her a consolatory, but demeaning, long service award. In this instance, 'Master Georgie' speaks for itself.

A reading of this book resembles a leafing through an album of old photographs dedicated to some unknown man named George Hardy. Each of the three narrators, who were once connected and loved him (though in different manner and degree), shows two pictures and tells their prehistories. The image of Master Georgie as a respectable, decent man turns into a central figure of such a weird sexual and family conundrum that it will take some time to perceive; an affectionate son turns into a frigid father and lover; a drunkard into a brave surgeon of the English army during the Crimean War; etc. The book ends in horrible bloody scenes of the senseless war carnage. Ms Beryl Bainbridge does not give an opportunity for George Hardy to speak, so we close the book but still do not understand who and what was George and why these three persons were so devoted to him. Just as in a real life: people come and go, we think we know them, but we usually know only their external appearance, and their essence remains a mystery...

Ms. Beryl Bainbridge writes Historical Fiction with as much skill as any writer, and much better than others who attempt the genre. Her stories rarely have definitive separations between what actually happened, and what might have happened to the characters she creates. The Crimean War is the setting this time, and while historically noteworthy is not as familiar as some of her other subjects, like The Titanic, or the doomed Scott Expedition to the South Pole. What is consistent is her ability to jump about through time periods without ever losing credibility. Each of her books reads as if a unique pen is behind each one. The hand of course is the same, however the moods created are remarkably singular.

The character that is the book's title is a complex human study, or if you prefer, a very intricate person but occupied with a mind and personality as muddled, as it is diverse. A grotesque death scene is the entrance for one of the narrator's of the book, an individual that would have lived as a street urchin but for chance, and an ambiguous bit of goodwill. A second street personality with many more wiles and flexible conduct also becomes a member of Master Georgie's entourage. This second narrator has a unique view of events, as he is close when Master Georgie requires, for the latter's sexuality is repressed at best. These are just two people who eventually head to the middle of The Crimean War, and the question that keeps shadowing the reader is why?

Escape from the latter half of 19th century London is an easy answer for George, but what of the others? Taking a trip toward an impending war as George's groupies is one matter, staying in the midst of a war is much more puzzling. This is one of the most difficult of Ms. Bainbridge's books that I have read. Previous works have often served as a metaphor for the time they occupy, or the closing act in a World that is about to undergo great disruptive change. This work is not as apparently decisive.

One characteristic is consistent, and that is her master's grasp of language. A lapful of cherries that serve as a metaphor will haunt a reader for some time. Her images of the dead and dying are less grotesquely graphic than most writers portray, but are far more disturbing than other wartime battles. This may not be the best of her work if it is the first of hers you experience, however if you can successfully decipher this one, that are several others that are much more comfortable to read.

Beryl Bainbridge has to be one of the greatest of all English authors. All of her books are superb and Master Georgie, her third book of historical fiction, is different, but no less superb, than the two preceeding. I think Master Georgie has not been praised quite highly enough because its subject matter may be less familiar to Americans than Bainbridge's two previous historicals. As a European, however, Master Georgie is definitely my favorite. It is quieter and more subtle, but I think it has much more emotional depth.

Bainbridge is always a little cryptic with her subject matter and Master Georgie is no exception. Don't let this put you off the book, though--the undercurrents of energy and intrigue make this short book riveting and well worth anyone's time.

The protagonist, Master Georgie, is actually George Hardy, a Victorian English dissolute and surgeon who, one day, decides to pack up his family and head for Turkey. Although his intentions are to provide medical care to the wounded during the Crimean war, we all know things rarely go as planned. Suffice it to say that Murphy's Law holds just as true for Master Georgie as it does for us.

The battlefield scenes are some of the best I have ever read, not surprising with Bainbridge. Although the scenes are brutal and sometimes even gruesome, this marvelous author has managed to infuse them with a sardonic wit that rivals anything I have ever read. Bainbridge is true to her subject matter in these scenes. Bainbridge chooses to forgo romanticism in favor of the reality of confusion and futility that surely must have existed on the battlefields of the Crimea. Lest you think she's making fun of her subjects, let me tell you she most assuredly is not. She is compassionate, but she wisely keeps that compassion from coloring the facts. I think she is simply interpreting events with her own brand of intelligence and irony.

Master Georgie can meander at times, but Bainbridge has even this meandering under complete control. She also tempers it with vivid details. We really feel as if we are reading an actual eyewitness account to the war.

Master Georgie is a short book, really more of a novella than a novel, and you can easily read it in one sitting if you so desire. Don't let its length fool you, though. Master Georgie is a dark book and one that really packs a punch. It is stylish, sophisticated and sardonic. In short, it is a book that is worthy of all the praise it has garnered.

I was attracted to this mesmerizing novel by its meditations on 19th century photography, Victorian middle-class hypocrisy and the Crimean War. Photography binds this brief novel together and Bainbridge revels in its historical and metaphorical possibilities. She organizes her chapters around photographs, which makes the reader immediately aware that she/he is to infer meaning from this practice and speculate on the role of photography in determing what and how we see and remember. Bainbridge is very sensitive to and aware of 19th century photography: its use during the Crimean War (the first war that photographs were taken of), connection to both science and magic, and the practice of post-mortem photography. The reader does have to work to explore the themes suggested by the author, but her historical grounding, lucid prose and rich subject make the effort worthwhile.

The writing is first rate, deft, spare, elegant and it is quite good enough to pull you through the book. It is a short book, after all. I would fault Ms. Bainbridge, though, for the confusing similarity of the narrative voice for the three narrators. It makes the book unnecessarily hard to follow.

My biggest problem is with the title character, George Hardy: he is by turns arrogant, cold-as-a-fish, pissy, condescending, bloodlessly asexual. The narrators' devotion to him is hard to fathom and one's lack of identification with him renders the book uninvolving.

Another problem: this is not a book to read if you are looking to find out something about the Crimean War, as I was. The book is very elliptical as regards its historical subject and I found this frustrating. If you are planning to read the book and are not familiar with the facts and background of the Crimean conflict I would suggest some preliminary research.

Geroge Hardy, a surgeon and amateur photographer, discovers his father dead in the bed of another woman and hastens to bring the body home before his mother learns of it. Three people help with this task, and their lives are irrevocaly changed because of it.

The story is told through the eyes of those three people close to Master Georige. The first is Myrtle, a young orphan who is accepted and raised by the Hardy family. She immediately falls in love with Georgie, a love that will carry her from the streets of Liverpool to the battlefields of the Crimean War. Next is Pompey Jones, a young street boy who helps move the body of George's father and then discovers George's passion for young men. The last is Dr. Potter, a family friend who follows George all the way to the Battle of Inkermann, never understanding George's aversion to women or why he wants to attach himself to a unit during the awful war. Through their eyes, we watch George change from a young doctor in England dealing with his father's troublesome death to the hardened field doctor trying to save lives during a time of war.

This is a fantastic historical novel, with some of the most descriptive war scenes I've read in quite some time. Bainbridge makes you feel the confusion, fear and dread that the soldiers faced both due to battle and due to disease. At the same time, she shows how one life can effect others, either for better or for worse. A highly engrossing novel.

At first glance Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge suggests it might be quite a light book, an easy read, a period piece set in the mid-nineteenth century. This would be wrong. Master Georgie is no safe tale of country house manners, of marriages imagined by confined, embroidering young women. Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie is anything but a tale of such saccharine gentility.

Master Georgie is a surgeon and photographer, and the book is cast in six plates - photographic plates, not chapters. Death figures throughout. From start to finish morbidity crashes into the lives of the book's characters. We begin with Mr Moody, dead in a brothel bed, his host of minutes before in shock. Later we move to the Crimean War, where the carnage is graphic, extensive and apparently random. And even then individuals find their own personal ways of adding insult and injury to the suffering.

The book uses multiple points of view. We see things Master Georgie's way. Myrtle, an orphan he takes in, adds her perspective. The fussy geologist, Dr Potter, imprints his own version of reality. And still there are less than explained undercurrents, undeclared motives which affect them all. Thus, overall, Master Georgie is a complex and ambitious novel. Though it is set in a major war, the backdrop is never allowed to dominate. The characters experience the consequences of conflict and register their reactions, but we are never led by the nose trough the history or the geography of the setting.

But we also never really get to know these people. Myrtle, perhaps, has the strongest presence. She has a slightly jaundiced, certainly pragmatic approach to life. But even she finds the privations of wartime tough. Why the characters of Master Georgie are all so keen to offer themselves as support for the war effort is an aspect of the book that never fully revealed itself. And ultimately this was my criticism of Beryl Bainbridge's book. While the overall experience was both rewarding and not a little shocking, I found there was insufficient delineation between the characters and their differing motives. The beauty of the prose, however, more than made up for any shortcoming. The language created the mixed world of mid-nineteenth century politeness and juxtaposed this with the visceral vulgarities of soldiering and the general struggle of life. This rendered Master Georgie a complex, moving and quite beautiful book.

Historic fiction requires exceptional skills to capture character as well as time and place. Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie certainly excels in this regard, reminding me of the skills of Hilary Mantel. The plight of a Crimean War surgeon comes alive in all its gore and misery and insanity. The tale is told through the eyes of the surgeon's brother-in-law, his off and on boyfriend and photographic assistant, and Myrtle, an orphan informally adopted by the family and mother of his children. The Crimean War offers a backdrop of incompetent diplomatic and military leadership dissolving into a nightmare of gore, horror, disease, dysentery, crime, and cruelty. Bainbridge captures the disorganized international disaster with many horrible bloody details, having her characters do the best they can to survive the catastrophe. Yet, Bainbridge captures more than just history, time, place, and character for her writing is poetic and her attention to detail is superb. Early in the novel, Myrtle cleans the dog hair off of a tiger skin rug and as she pulls the white dog hairs from the brush, they float like dandelion seed up the wind-draft of the staircase and nestle on the chandelier. It is such details that make the book beautiful and horrible at the same time. The pace of the book is excellent and she moves the reader from critical chapter to chapter in the lives of the main characters. I almost think she wrote too little in this book. I would have loved to have the book twice as long. The character of Pompey Jones, the bisexual street urchin, is fascinating and I wish Bainbridge had written a novel just for this self-aware, self-assured, character to follow Master Georgie. Bainbridge actually focuses much of the novel on the character of Myrtle, and we learn as much about her amazing strength of character as we do about that of her sometime lover George Hardy. Myrtle and Pompey are both orphans, street wise, highly intelligent, and are recognized for their strengths by the Hardy family.
George Hardy is never fully explained and made visible to the viewer for his motives are somewhat hidden. As a homosexual or bisexual physician from an upper class home, it appears that his service in the Crimean is somewhat of a penance, a sacrifice, for his sexuality. He strives to be the perfect son to his father, mother, and siblings, yet the secret of his sexuality means that a critical part of him must be hidden from his family. George Hardy appears to sacrifice himself during the Crimean War due to his sexual orientation over which he has no control. In some ways this is also a study of gay guilt in the Victorian period and the mechanisms and strategies undertaken to atone for an unacceptable sexual orientation. George is contrasted with Pompey who seems much more at home with his bisexuality, recognizing it as more a part of himself and as an asset by which he can manipulate both men and women. The narrative of war is haunting, reminding me of the outstanding novels of Pat Barker about World War I. We read of handsome shirtless soldiers dying from eating unwashed cherries or horses bleeding to death while standing with bullet holes through their body. It is the third narrator, Dr. Potter, George's brother-in-law that offers unique looks at all the other characters. Potter is intellectual and foolish at the same time. He lacks practicality but his power of observation is evident. Overall the book is excellent, a post-modern masterpiece, telling a complex tale from multiple points of view but never giving the `definitive' story behind the story.

It's difficult to know quite where to begin here, in the face of such overwhelming praise from so many satisfied readers. It's not that it's badly written, just that it fails to illuminate Master Georgie's life. That after all should be its purpose, particularly where, as here, that person existed and at least one of the events described took place. The author is content to conjure up others to act as prisms, which would be a useful literary device if they illuminated the central figure, but instead we see him through a glass darkly. I may be in a minority of one, but it failed to live up to my expectations.