“The complex tensions of family life.” said Margaret Drabble, but like the “unhappy family” of Anna Karenina, Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse”, the family relationships are just the setting for musings about human roles in the world more widely. Set before and after WWI, apart from the point of it all, the different class, generation and gender expectations are front and centre.
Being recommended I should read Woolf more than once, and attempting “To The Lighthouse” several times, it was one of the half-read books I was re-shelving for later as part of my new writing focus, but reminded how short it was, I gave it a final go and completed it over a couple of days.
Apart from that general recommendation, I’d also noted the suggestion that one of the characters was modelled on T.E. Lawrence, which gave me added impetus, since he is one of my heroes. I was baffled to find that it was the “absurd” Mr Ramsey was the character in question since he was head of the household with a family of 8 children, when TEL was a recent graduate archaeologist before the war. Woolf knew Lawrence and he knew the Bloomsbury set. Definitely a bit of the obsessive bookish dreamer in both of them, but Lawrence surely much more “in the frame” of lived experience?
Strangely when reading in the bar, the question of why I would be reading such a classic came up, and I used Tolstoy’s Karenina as an illustration of a well known classic with unsuspected depth and value beyond the popular motifs. After the Anna and Vronsky relationship and the thrusting images of horses and steam trains that make up the familiar dramatisations, fully half of the Tolstoy work is autobiographical musings on his own life, the universe and everything in the thin disguise of his Levin character. I say strangely because of the coincidence that Karenina is also a topic of discussion for the adults in the Lighthouse.
Tolstoy’s is a book in two clear halves, Woolf’s in three though the middle section is a shorter “passing of time” scene-setting between the two main before and after the war sections. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to point out that the latter half comes with the dose of life-and-death, love-and-loss, reality injected into the original idyllic setting by the war itself and that the eventual arrival at the Lighthouse is something of an anti-climax. So much of the narrative is dialogue, thought but unspoken, in the awkward tensions I recognise between the genders and generations. And there is a clear interplay between the masculine rationality of science and the feminine irrationality of art. You can see why in its time it was an important work, but I felt the whole an anti-climax. Ho hum, onwards and upward.
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