The best novel I've read that wrestles with the meaning of life was once The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. That honor now belongs to Of Human Bondage, written by Maugham thirty-nine years earlier. This voluminous, passionate epic of ideas and expectations concerns one Philip Carey, born with a club foot in London in the 1880s as he journeys into adulthood, encumbering relationships and suspending them, searching for his calling and his own answer to the question posed by so many 20th cent

The best novel I've read that wrestles with the meaning of life was once The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. That honor now belongs to Of Human Bondage, written by Maugham thirty-nine years earlier. This voluminous, passionate epic of ideas and expectations concerns one Philip Carey, born with a club foot in London in the 1880s as he journeys into adulthood, encumbering relationships and suspending them, searching for his calling and his own answer to the question posed by so many 20th century artists, but few as eloquently as Maugham. What Is Life?



Philip is introduced as a child in 1885. His father, a surgeon with a good practice, died unexpectedly of blood poisoning. He's survived by a pregnant wife in fragile health and a son, Philip. A poor manager of money, Mrs. Carey encounters more misfortune when she delivers a stillborn son and passes away. Philip's paternal uncle William, vicar of Blackstable, arrives to take custody of his nephew, raising him sixty miles from London with his wife, Louisa. The childless couple are all thumbs when it comes to parenting. The vicar is a thrifty, obtuse man while his wife suffers quietly under his lack of affection, but raise their nephew as if he was their own.



Raised in the vicarage, where he bathes no more than once per week in a tub near the kitchen boiler, in the same manner his uncle, aunt and their maid Mary Ann do on opposite days of the week, Philip has few peers his own age, and grows into the solitary, often lonely life of an only child. Forbidden from playing games on Sundays and brought to tears over being assigned the memorization of collects from the prayer book, Philip is handed an illustrated book his aunt sneaks from her husband's study. A lifelong passion for books begins.



One day a good fortune befell him, for he hit upon Lane's translation of The Thousand Nights and a Night. He was captured first by the illustrations, and then he began to read, to start with, the stories that dealt with magic, and then the others; and those he liked he read again and again. He could think of nothing else. He forgot the life about him. He had to be called two or three times before he would come to his dinner. Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of the every day a source of bitter disappointment. Presently he began to read other things. His brain was precocious. His uncle and aunt, seeing that he occupied himself and neither worried nor made a noise, ceased to trouble themselves about him. Mr. Carey had so many books that he did not know them, and as he read little he forgot the odd lots he had bought at one time and another because they were cheap. Haphazard among the sermons and homilies, the travels, the lives of the Saints, the Fathers, the histories of the church, were old-fashioned novels; and these Philip at last discovered. He chose them by their titles, and the first he read was The Lancashire Witches, and then he read The Admirable Crichton, and then many more. Whenever he started a book with two solitary travelers riding along the brink of a desperate ravine he knew he was safe.



At the age of nine, Philip is sent to King's School at Tercanbury, where the neighboring clergy send their sons for their primary education. His club foot rules him out of sports and is often made a target of ridicule among the other boys, but even after his deformity is accepted and ignored, it remains a source of sensitivity for him. Accepting everything he reads, Philip believes the Bible and becomes a devout boy. Assured by his uncle and others that the power of faith can move mountains, Philip prays for God to give him a normal foot. The lack of results leads Philip to question for the first time what he's read or been told.



Philip develops a cutting sense of humor and is ultimately befriended by a boy named Rose whose attention flatters Philip and before leading to jealousy. When Rose abandons Philip for a new best friend, Philip loses all interest in school or sours on a scholarship to Oxford. He announces his desire to study in Germany and resisting all attempts by adults to sway Philip to finish one thing before he starts another, the boy eventually gets his wish. A friend of his aunt's recommends a boarding house in Heidelberg run by a professor.



In Heidelberg, free to rise and study at his leisure, Philip learns some German, a bit of French but is mostly schooled by the personalities of the boarders he meets. An Englishman named Hayward is son of a county judge; a lover of literature and Roman Catholicism, he's an idealist, and recommends many books to his new acolyte, which Philip devours. An American philosophy student named Weeks sees Hayward less as a poet and more of a waster, and with deliberate self-assurance, calls the Englishman out on his inconsistencies during their fireside chats. Philip continues his education.



One of the things that Philip had heard definitely stated was the the unbeliever was a wicked and vicious man; but Weeks, though he believed in hardly anything that Philip believed, led a life of Christian purity. Philip had received little kindness in his life, and he was touched by the American's desire to help him: once when a cold kept him in bed for three days, Weeks nursed him like a mother. there was neither vice nor wickedness in him, but only sincerity and loving-kindness. It was evidently possible to be virtuous and unbelieving.



Returning to Blackstable after three months, Philip meets Miss Wilkinson, daughter of his uncle's last rector, whose exact age becomes a frustrating riddle to the boy as he becomes taken with her. Having worked as a governess in Berlin and Paris, Miss Wilkinson thrills Philip with her tales of being seduced by an art student in the City of Lights. Philip sets his mind to seducing the older woman. As for his future, Philip sits on a meager fortune of only two thousand pounds, and eager to go to London, it is recommended by the family lawyer that Philip apprentice as a chartered accountant.



Philip greets loneliness in London and what at that time, seems like misery. Socializing with few people other than his fellow clerks, he's bored to death by the work. He begins making sketches on company stationary to pass the time and while a career in accounting begins to look dim, he's compelled by Hayward to devote his life to the only two things that matter: love and art. The idea grabs hold of Philip and when his apprenticeship at the accounting firm expires, he bucks the expectations of his uncle and with some financial assistance from his aunt, is off on his next great adventure: studying art in Paris.



As in his last foreign experience, Philip falls in immediately with his fellow students in Paris. He grows close with a conceited, disagreeable art student named Fanny Price. Philip finds her paintings atrocious and her hygiene nearly as bad, while her poorly communicated affections for him grow. Philip wonders whether he has what it takes to be a successful artist and falls under the spell of a penniless drunk and writer named Cronshaw who the art students tell knew all the greats. Cronshaw tells Philip where he can find the answers to all his questions.



"Have you ever been to the Cluny, the museum? There you will see Persian carpets of the most exquisite hue and of a pattern the beautiful intricacy of which delights and amazes the eye. In them you will see the mystery and the sensual beauty of the East, the roses of Hafiz and the wine-cup of Omar; but presently you will see more. You were asking just now what was the meaning of life. Go and look at those Persian carpets, and one of these days the answer will come to you."



"You are cryptic," said Philip.



"I am drunk," answered Cronshaw.



W. Somerset Maugham saw Of Human Bondage published in 1915, but if fleeting mention of year was redacted within the novel, it would be impossible to determine whether his story takes place in 1900, 1950 or 2000. The book is completely devoid of trends, fashions or popular culture and is more passionate, witty and vivacious for it. Edith Wharton is one of my favorite authors, but even with her I feel claustrophobia of the early 20th century, as if squeezed inside an hour glass and being smothered. Maugham transcends era. He could be writing about characters and conversations taking place at the corner coffeehouse. His wisdom is nearly as impressive as his language.



It is a mixed lot which enters upon the medical profession, and naturally there are some who are lazy and reckless. They think it is an easy life, idle away a couple of years; and then, because their funds come to an end or because angry parents refuse any longer to support them, drift away from the hospital. Others find the examinations too hard for them; one failure after another robs them of their nerve; and, panic-stricken, they forget as soon as they come into the forbidding buildings of the Conjoint Board the knowledge which before they had so pat. They remain year after year, objects of good-humoured scorn to younger men: some of them crawl through the examination of the Apothecaries' Hall; others become non-qualified assistants, a precarious position in which they are at the mercy of their employer; their lot is poverty, drunkenness, and Heaven only knows their end.



Of Human Bondage is a thick novel, but a thrilling one. Maugham is a storyteller, first and foremost. He introduces one of the great villains of literature in Mildred Rogers, an ice queen Philip becomes inexplicably enamored with in London and is nearly destroyed by in a manner I found too familar. Likewise the charismatic friends who come and go, the aunt who loves more than is loved, the dead end job, the family member on their death bed, I recognized from my own life.



Maugham takes the reader on a search for the meaning of life but does so without peddling hokey sermons. Instead, before there were even such a thing as documentaries, he structures the novel like one, focusing on a boy as he moves through childhood and into adulthood. There are many stops along the way and times I expected the novel to settle down, kick up its feet and explore one relationship, or one travelogue, all the way through. Instead, the story moves on, just like a life.