Page Six

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

I picked this book up because I wanted to see the film, and I rarely like to see a film of a book before I've read the book. I approached the book almost apprehensively, afraid to find it slow-moving and dull (why, I'm not sure). Instead, I found this to be another quick read and quite engaging. Kitty is the shallow, self-centred wife of Walter Fane, a bacteriologist. She marries him because she is getting a bit desperate. She is in her mid-twenties and her younger sister has just become engaged: she thinks her time is running out, and her mother is not about to continue to support her. The couple moves to Hong Kong and within the first two years of marriage Kitty, who finds Walter a bore, begins a passionate affair with Charles Townsend. Walter, who has treated Kitty with nothing but kindness, finds out and gives her a choice: she can divorce him if Charles agrees to divorce his wife and marry her, otherwise she must move with him to Mei-tan-fu, a cholera-infested area of China. Since much of the book/movie depicts their time in Mei-tan-fu, I think the outcome is clear (as is the true character of Charles Townsend).

I loved this book because I kept having to remind myself that a man wrote it. At the beginning of the book you think Kitty is fairly useless and cruel. Near the end you still may have ambivalent feelings towards her, but her self-discovery is quite intruiging and the mistakes she makes are very human.

I actually did not like the movie, but I wonder if I would have had I watched it before reading the book. The book delves into Kitty's psyche and self-realizations, and the movie highly romanticizes . . . pretty much everything.