Middlemarch

I am struggling with Middlemarch. I read it once before, when I was a student and had an essay to write on George Eliot, and I read Middlemarch one night and Daniel Deronda the next, and unsurprisingly neither of them left much of an impression. But I've always thought that I ought to have another go. So I took it on holiday with me this year.

Usually I take four or five books, to give a bit of variety and allow for disappointment, and expect to read them all or mostly all. This year I decided just to take Middlemarch, figuring that it was a good thick book, that I was bound to enjoy it and that it would be pleasant to be reading about life in a small town in nineteenth-century England, while I was sitting in the Portuguese sun. I thought it would make a piquant contrast.

But I found that I couldn't get on with it. For a start, I couldn't find anywhere comfortable to sit and read. I used to lie and read on the beach, but I'm getting too old and stiff to find it comfortable to be lying flat and reading; back at the apartment, the roof terrace was too hot and it was too stuffy to sit indoors; and anyway, to be able to settle and read happily I have to be either on my own or with someone else who is also reading companionably and silently (isn't it enraging to be trying to read beside someone who keeps laughing out loud at their book? But that's by the way). So circumstances conspired to make reading difficult.

It didn't help that you have to put an awful lot of effort into the beginning of a book like Middlemarch. There are so many characters in it, and they are all related in all sorts of complicated family ways, and all those intricate relationships affect the plot so you can't just ignore them. You can't afford to get Mr Featherstone mixed up with Mr Farebrother, or forget who is whose sister-in-law. It is all a lot more difficult than The Archers, and even in The Archers I sometimes forget who is who, despite the writers giving me a lot more reminders than George Eliot does. Perhaps it would have been easier to sit and read it in one huge burst. As it was, struggling through a dozen or twenty pages and then putting it aside for a day, by the time I came back to it I had forgotten who everyone was and what had happened.

And I started not to care. None of the characters are very engaging, being variously vacuous, vicious, naive, deluded or just plain dull. There's nothing like a bit of social comedy, but you have to like at least some of the people some of the time. Otherwise it is just like real life.

So of course I started playing truant from Middlemarch and reading other things instead, Dawn French's autobiography for one, which was more fun than Middlemarch as well as being shorter. It certainly has better jokes.

I'm still reading Middlemarch on the train. I don't like to be beaten by a book and it would be just too shaming to have to give up on George Eliot. I'm about halfway through, which still leaves me 400 and more pages. I am trying not to spend the journey looking out of the window instead...