Customer Reviews

Self Condemned

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While I've always been a great admirer of the eccentric painter and author Wyndham Lewis, I find most of his fiction frustratingly unsatisfying. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, "Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into Wyndham Lewis's so-called novels... Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books right through. Some indefinable quality, a sort of literary vitamin... is absent from them."

That's not the case with Lewis's oddly gripping masterpiece SELF-CONDEMNED. Here, for once, Lewis tells a story that engages your emotions and involves you with the fate of his protagonist. The plot is simple and terrible. Rene Harding, an icily forbidding Oxford Don, decides that history is bunk and, to avoid becoming entangled in the upcoming war with Hitler, immigrates to an utterly dreary Canadian town with his feeble-minded wife Hester. There they suffer extreme poverty and neglect, which Lewis depicts slowly and remorselessly, in Dreiserian detail. There is no relief for the reader, no feel-good ending, but there is genuine catharsis.

Nobody would call this novel perfect. There are many aimless digressions and longueurs. But Lewis's vision is so original, and his descriptions are so vivid, I have no hesitation in giving SELF-CONDEMNED five stars. Highlights include a surreal, horrifying portrayal of a hotel burning down in the Canadian winter and creating a "fiery iceberg", a satirical encounter with one of those foolish Johnsonian professors who "roll towards their interlocutor heavy carefully picked words, reminiscent of those which thundered in the small talk of the formidable Lexicographer", and a funny scene in which Harding flings a copy of MIDDLEMARCH into the open sea.

I'm so glad this great novel is now available as an eBook. Hopefully it will encourage other e-publishers to release more of Wyndham Lewis's work.