Maugham has a special place in my heart. When I first read his novel I was nineteen, more naive and working. I spent reading hours on the train on my way to work, and I didn’t remember the exact reason – perhaps I was standing for too long or happened to be in strange moods – I got so disturbed by his writing that later on, I always used the amount of disturbance to measure my experience of novels. Looking back, Maugham’s style is regrettably far less adorned and experimental than his contemporaries such as Fitzgerald or Faulkner. But I still consider him a suave and thoughtful writer for his shrewd understanding of human conditions. This is what makes his stories just as worthwhile and valuable to read.
Maugham wrote The Razor’s Edge under the backdrop of the First World War, about a story of an American pilot named Larry, who was traumatised by the death he witnessed during fights. He later returned to home country abandoning the life plan he had previously agreed to, instead flying off to Paris to search for knowledge and spiritual transcendence. One of the biggest conflicts was between Larry and his fiancee, Isabel, who was in no way able to comprehend Larry’s sudden personality change. She wanted a life of affluence and was desperate for him to agree with her visions: riding on horseback, having their own cars, luxurious clothing and food, and a social life surrounded by people of higher circles. Larry, on the other hand, deeply driven to fill up the emotional void the war had left him, could no longer yield to her. Following from here, the narrative lucidly unfolded the development of their decisions and the people that worked their fate.
I think this book is underrated for its merits. Firstly, it deals with a perennial theme in life: all humans have their unique tragedies and must deal with them; and the tragic part isn’t the tragedy per se, but that there are no intrinsic solutions we can leap into. Isabel’s tragedy lies in the necessity to determine which life path she would like between two limited, incompatible options: love or money. She could have a life with someone she loved, but poor, or marry a millionaire she could only put up with seeing, and die rich. Larry’s tragedy, with him equally in love and desperate to heal, unravelled through the trauma brought by the War, which led him astray from the conventions called upon by the society. Both had to decide which desire to prune off, in order to reconcile with their reality.
Eventually, Isabel voted for the latter, and I think this is a prudent decision. Remember, these people didn’t live under the time with the convenience we now have. As a woman in the 1920s, time frame to find happiness was cruelly short, and the criteria of a good life was also heavily scoped by the opinions of others. If she was to choose Larry, she also had to prepare to be miserable in other ways. The point being, we will always be constrained by our time and personal limitations. We have flaws and wishes, and sometimes, the universe is just too indifferent to make them always go harmoniously together. We will have to prune off some parts of ourselves and accept the inevitable tragedy to live with less.
The second theme is subtler, yet also echoing throughout the book: Larry’s hard choice implied the spiritual decay of the generation that lived through the War. It was in the same period that human’s capacity for evil was manifested to its peak – and in fact, most soldiers got traumatised not because they had seen the killing, but that they had done it themselves. In the novel, this provoked Larry to go on a lifelong journey to discover the truth about existence and the purpose of God. Although Maugham doesn’t dwell on the details, I think the questions are rather obvious to guess: why on earth would God create beings that murdered each other in such an atrocious, cold-blooded manner? And if God really loved humans, why would he let such a catastrophe happen at all, taking millions of lives and bringing suffering to households? Was God dead, or had he just abandoned us? These are indeed very difficult questions to answer, and I believe that made the birth of existentialism. After all, with ‘the death of God’ and a sudden collapse of humanities, we were left with the problem to sustain ourselves meaningfully. Life wasn’t just work, economy and consumerism.
I first read the book early last year, resting on the couch and complaining to a friend how irresponsible and careless Larry’s choice seemed to me. I didn’t appreciate the context as much as I do now. My friend said I should just leave Larry to do his own thing, to which I didn’t give too keen of a response. Now I think he probably had a point.
Siming Lan 