Life is Just a Bowl of Green of Ox-Tails
Ever since it first appeared, critics have noted that this novel of Maugham is not just grim and depressing, but relentlessly so. And, what’s more, there is never even the slightest hint that hope is worth the effort. Maugham started his career as a novelist waist-deep in the big muddy of unadorned naturalistic realism and he took it to levels readers who know him only from his later blockbusters would probably think impossible. Bad things happen to good people and to make matters all the grimmer, even the good people really aren’t that good. The message here is impossible to get around: life sucks and then you die young and painfully.
The Working Class Blues
Despite the notable lack of substances to be abused, there is not really a lot of distance that can be put between this very late 19th century British novel and the late 20th century novel Trainspotting. Both tell stories of working-class poor in the U.K., and both threaten to verge into the abyss of absolute nihilism. Surprisingly, perhaps, for those who find the film adaptation of Trainspotting to be an immersive experience in hopeless desolation, it is Trainspotting that introduces the possibility of hope into the bleakness of lives which do not seem to have fundamentally altered over the course of quite a transformative century. The theme which really sticks out to the modern-day reader is that the conditions of the working class in capitalist countries is systemically designed to obstruct upward mobility.
Most People are Their Own Worst Enemy
This theme must be situated within the context of the systemic beatdown of hope among the working class. Maugham proves to be surprisingly insightful about the complexity of working-class conditions for a guy named Somerset whose older brother briefly held the only position in the British government ranking higher than Prime Minister, Lord Chancellor. Part of the problem with a system designed to keep a large chunk of the population from rising past a certain level of success is the psychology it produces. And that psychological state of mind can be expressed most effectively in one hyphenated word: self-destructiveness. When one knows there is only so much one reasonable hope for, it becomes easy to just give up on hope altogether and that decision inevitably leads to bad choices because, well, why not? The choices made by Liza and best friend Sally are particularly self-destructive, but Maugham makes sure to remind the reader of an essential contextual circumstance: even if their choices had been significantly better, their lives would likely have been only minimally improved.
