Eustace and Hilda: A Trilogy (New York Review Books Classics)

. . . or some similar heading is rightly earned by L. P. Hartley's _Eustace and Hilda_. You will have read elsewhere that this trilogy is told largely through the point of view of Eustace Cherrington; he is the central consciousness, though an omniscient (all-knowing) narrator method is necessary to make the novel work as a whole, and to give the novel a sense of movement outside the mind of one person. Everyone enjoys reading _The Go-Between_ whose main character, Leo, is another sensitive young boy, and, in retrospect, Eustace seems to be a preparation for that novel, but E & H is an enduring element in British fiction. I didn't want this trilogy to end; from time to time, I would set it aside and read other novels so that I could ponder the fate of the Cherringtons. There seems to be a debate as to whether or not the entire trilogy, _Eustace and Hilda_, (including _The Shrimp & the Anemone_, _The Sixth Heaven_ and _E & H_) can be called a masterpiece. Novel One is an outright masterpiece, partly because Eustace is still a child at the end, and as a result, the novel has no awkward life-changes to negotiate. We meet all the main characters, Mr. Cherrington and his sister, Aunt Sarah, the housekeeper and Eustace's confidante, Minney, as well as the wealthy Staveleys, the adventurous Steptoes, and Miss Fothergill. And there is Hartley's evocation of the Norfolk coast, the seaside village, and the dark woods of the Anchorstone Hall mansion. (Hartley has that quality of all great British novelists: the skill to evoke the darkly romantic countryside.) In volume one, we also discover the enduring themes: the effects of money on human identity and a hint of the sexual confusion to come in adulthood. I'm not giving anything away if I say that money solves some problems and creates others. Also in the first volume, Hartley hints that repressed sexuality will move the plot in volume two and three. Early on, Eustace goes on a paper-chase with Nancy, and Hilda turns down an opportunity to go horseback riding with Dick Staveley; both dramas burn in the minds of Hilda and Eustace and color their lives. (I don't want to give anything away.) If novels two and three of the trilogy are not clear-cut masterpieces it might be because the classic realist text was no longer possible after World War II (the novel of clear, simple, unambiguous action), but also because it's a novelist's minefield when the main characters go through those horrible years of identity formation--from age twelve to twenty-five. But Hartley is an unqualified genius in the way he takes the potentially banal Freudian interpretations of the 1930s and `40s and makes then into art. If consistency and comprehensibility of the plot, and believability of character, constitute a masterwork then the sum of _Eustace and Hilda_ is just that: finely orchestrated genius. There are episodes in which Eustace will daydream and fantasize--presaging magic realism--and it's a quite believable. Moreover, the total meaning of E & H is completely acceptable, if sad and regrettable. The sections set in Venice with Lady Nelly Staveley are a feast for the imagination--and Eustace has the soul of an artist. For some readers, Hilda might be a little too controlling and dominating to be believable, but the pieces of the puzzle were set up early in the novel when she was fourteen and Eustace about ten. It's important to note that they have an infant sister, Barbara, who represents the "normal" human development of the time: love of jazz and dancing plus early romance and marriage. It seems that Hilda and Eustace were thrown together because their mother died young, and insecurity and mutual influence would result; in addition, Aunt Sarah and Minney want Hilda and Eustace to remain children--unfortunately believable in people who fear change. The scenes at Oxford University were a delight to read, and when I realized that most of volume two and three would take place in Venice, I was thrilled. I don't understand reviewers who recommend that we pass up Eustace and Hilda. Besides, there is nothing like a solid British sentence, and Hartley's have the cadence of poetry and the arc of drama. Rest in peace, Leslie. And thank you, again, to NYRB Classics; the book cover illustration suggests the theme of "the tomb of our greatest desires."

Exceptional writing, humorous, complex character development... A joy to read! As it is actually a compilation of 3 books, it is quite long, but well worth the time spent!

Vaguely old fashioned, of a different and perhaps more gracious time, Eustace and Hilda traces thechanging relationships of a brother and sister whose lives are altered when one of them inherits a small fortune. Hartley does British stoicism and noblesse oblige to a T, and with an excellent ear for dialogue that perfectly captures the era -- early in the last century. This is not a book read for plot as much as for the beauty of Hartley's prose. It's not so much to be dashed off to find out what happens next as it is a slow and satisfying read to those who appreciate style and substance.

Anita Brookner, in her introduction to Hartley's trilogy, makes much of a comparison between Hartley and Henry James. This is at once apt and inapt. It is apt in that James is certainly the novelist one is reminded of most by this trilogy. But it is terribly inapt in that James is much the better writer and his works are truly "masterpieces", a claim Brookner makes for this work which simply won't hold literary water. Hartley certainly holds his own with James in mere description of place, and thus one is reminded at different points of James's most popular novel (A Portrait of A Lady) and his best (The Ambassadors).-But all similarity ends here.-There are none of the depths of character insight of which James is such a master, nor, really....anything else to remind one of James. Just page after page of-description-that leads to one cul-de-sac after another (a good example is the chapter "The Larva" or "ghost" in Latin, which seems to have been written with absolutely no purpose in mind, or perhaps a forgotten one). Yes, there is an overall plot. But one doesn't come away with any insights into the human condition in the way one does from a James novel, or any "masterpiece" for that matter. The overall effect of this novel and of the writing is a sort of slippage, that the author doesn't really know where he's going with Eustace or Hilda, and that they don't know where they're going either, and the reader is left wearily turning page after page waiting for some, any sort of insight.-Perhaps to say this is to equate Hartley, in some sense, with Eustace himself-Everything is sinking or slipping, much like Venice, where much of the book occurs. There is a passage which describes this quite nicely when Eustace (typically) just happens to find himself amidst a "lustral" bathing: "He felt his identity flowing out of him, to be soaked up heedlessly by the grains of sand or parcelled out in fragments of a thousandth among all the figures standing or sprawling round him."p.533 This is very much what reading this book is like. Hartley does a much better job with The Go-Between, which I would recommend to all prospective readers rather than this meandering book.-Or, if you really are in search of a "masterpiece" of this sort, Henry James's The Ambassadors will not leave you sinking, dear reader.

A friend gave me this book for my birthday, extolling the virtues of the writing. At first I thought the writing wasn't so much the thing as the delicate, nuanced understanding of character -- in particular of the sibling main characters. But as the book (really a trilogy published in one volume) progressed, I began to appreciate the writing itself. In the intro, Anita Brookner describes the writing as Jamesian, and I guess as a dissection of class distinctions and the difficulties and intricacies thereof, that's apt -- but I think in terms of delineation of character and subtleties of mood, it's more like Virginia Woolf. My friend also promised that nothing happens in this book, which would make it appealing to me. This is not quite true, although most of the plotty stuff is in the last 1/4 or so when Hilda falls in love with a rakish and unsuitable aristocrat, is spurned and suffers nervous paralysis, at which point Eustace rushes home from summering in Venice to nurse her. The central metaphor of the book is a shrimp being devoured by an anemone -- and the fatal interdependence of the two (without the shrimp, the anemone starves). Hilda has dominated poor, delicate Eustace since birth but for the brief period of her love affair and his time in Venice. After her cure, she resumes her domineering ways. Eustace hopes to break free, but in the last image he dreams of placing his finger in an anemone's "mouth" where he can't find a shrimp to sustain it. The book is essentially tragic and a times very painful to read -- Hilda in the name of morality is cruel to poor Eustace. But it is also very funny, particularly the aristocratic characters at Oxford (Antony) and in Venice (Jasper Bentwich).

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I read "Eustace and Hilda" over the course of a year, slowly moving through its 750 pages, with breaks between each part of the trilogy--and yet I have not been so sorry to finish a book in quite a long time. Months later, I can safely say that the trilogy as a whole is one of my all-time favorite novels, and I think most readers who prefer the subdued pacing of a psychological coming-of-age story will also fall in love with Hartley's portrait of this brother and sister. Not that they themselves are easy to love. This is the type of novel that might cause a less empathetic reader to mutter, "I can't relate to any of the characters." Eustace is meek, almost pathetic; Hilda is manipulative and domineering. On the one hand, they are completely codependent (to use the modern term); on the other, they are bizarrely incompatible. Hilda both feeds and feeds off Eustace's insecurities, and more often than not Eustace confuses her bossiness for love--although, make no mistake, these two siblings do love each other. The lopsided dynamic between the pair makes up much of "The Shrimp and the Anemone," the first part of the trilogy, and, although there are moments that are endearing, even touching, there are also passages when any reader might want to give either of them (and especially Eustace) a good shake. But what also stands out is not only how funny and droll Hartley's prose can be but also how accurately he describes the experience of growing up: the ability of a child to turn the smallest slight into the greatest travesty, or to fantasize the most mundane observation (waves in a bathtub) as a spectacular event (a tidal wave of epic proportions). I'm not the first reader to notice the Dickensian echoes that pervade this post-Victorian novel. But few seem to have written about the parallels between this trilogy and a major subplot in "David Copperfield." The similarities are both superficial and profound. In both works, the boy and girl are for the first time described together on the beach; she's bossy and beautiful, he's shy and insecure. An initially fearsome but ultimately saintly matron (Betsey Trotwood/Miss Fothergill) supplies the boy with the financial security otherwise unavailable to the protagonist of either novel. (Some readers have compared Miss Fothergill to Miss Havisham, from "Great Expectations," but I think this is mistaken; Miss Fothergill is neither farcical nor wholly tragic, and she has in mind Eustace's well-being--not a misanthropic desire for revenge). Yet it is the second book, "The Sixth Heaven," that most reminds me of Dickens's great novel, in which a impressionable youth idolizes a rich, confident boy (Stavely/Steerforth), who is subsequently introduced by the younger friend to a sisterly figure (Emily/Hilda), with traumatic results--an outcome inevitable because of the unfortunate societal strictures that separate the classes. In each book, it must be said, the adoration of the young boy for his idol is platonically homoerotic, and the girl seems to be virtually a sacrifice for the boy's misplaced trust. That Eustace and Hilda's story is told entirely through Eustace's eyes, while Hilda's calamity occurs mostly off-stage, only adds to the likeness between the two works. Much of the third book, simply called "Eustace and Hilda," takes place in Venice, where Eustace lives among the upper crust of the expatriate community and tries to fit in, with middling and muddling success. Even less "happens" than in the previous books; instead the action and tension move almost entirely to the internal monologues and runaway daydreams that occupy Eustace's mind. By now, Hartley here has added Henry James and E. M. Forster to the mix. But all these elements are mere echoes of his literary forebears; the trilogy is neither an update nor a homage nor a revisionist narrative, and the literary allusions never stand in the way of the intense psychological portraits he has created. Instead, this is Dickens and James and Forster filtered through the modernist prisms of Freud and Proust and Woolf, all of which come together as a unique, haunting, and heart-rending masterpiece. I can't wait to read it again in a few years.

It is much too long and I am neither sympathetic or interested in Eustace. It is almost sophomoric in revealing Eustace's thoughts.