C

by Maurice Baring

Baring’s homage to a decadent and carefree Edwardian age depicts a society as yet untainted by the traumas and complexities of twentieth-century living. With wit and subtlety a happy picture is drawn of family life, house parties in the country and a leisured existence clouded only by the rumblings of the Boer War. Against this spectacle Caryl Bramsley (the C of the title) is presented – a young man of terrific promise but scant achievement, whose tragic-comic tale offsets the privileged milieu.

The Born in London in 1874, Maurice Baring was a man of letters, a scion of a family long prominent in the financial ventures of the British Empire. The son of the 1st Baron Revelstoke (a director of the Bank of England and a senior partner at Baring Bros.) he was educated at Eton and at Cambridge, and joined the diplomatic service in 1898. In 1904 he became a journalist and reported the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria; later he was a correspondent in Russia and Constantinople. He is credited with having discovered Chekov’s work in Moscow and helping to introduce it to the West. Baring is remembered as a versatile, prolific and highly successful writer, who produced articles, plays, biographies, criticism, poetry, translations, stories and novels. He is regarded as a representative of the social culture that flourished in England before World War I, his work highly regarded to this day for the acute intimate portraits of the time.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Novels

527 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Maurice Baring OBE (27 April 1874 – 14 December 1945) was an English man of letters, known as a dramatist, poet, novelist, translator and essayist, and also as a travel writer and war correspondent, with particular knowledge of Russia. During World War I, Baring served in the Intelligence Corps and Royal Air Force.

Reviews

[Jeff Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those books where if I had just given a summation of the plot, I would have had no interest in it. I had heard of Baring because of his relationship with Chesterton and Belloc and that his own novels were popular. It was reading Joseph Pearce's article on this novel that I became interested in it.

While this is a fairly long novel, it kept my interest throughout. It takes its time relating the story of “C”, the nickname given to the novel’s protagonist, the Honorable Caryl Bramsley. More than a coming of age story as it extends throughout C's life. The intro intones that this story is going to be a tragedy in some aspect.

I was just so involved in C's personality, his quirks, pretensions, and his blindness to himself. There were times in the novel that I just wanted to slap this character, to bring him out of his sometimes contrariness and not seeing the surrounding good without being suspicious it would fall apart. Rarely has a character brought this response from me. There are several motifs that remind us of Dante (intentionally) along with how C's secularism dealing with the faith of some important figures around him.

[Pater Edmund · Rating 4 out of 5]

C has obvious parallels to the Puppet Show of Memory, but is as sad as the Puppet Show is happy. Evelyn Waugh says somewhere that C is one cliché after another and that this is “the curse of the polyglot”, but I think that if one has read the Puppet Show of Memory one can see that to Baring they are not clichés at all; he wasn’t lazily taking other peoples expressions, they were all expressions the truth of which he had really experienced. After all, as David Foster Wallace once said, clichés only got to be clichés in the first place because they were originally so true. They are only deplorable in people for whom they don’t signify any reality. I found C beautiful and moving.

[Herb Hastings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine writing a novel about passionate and obsessive love without ever mentioning sex. This book, written in the early 1920's, manages with grace and style to accomplish this. The setting is the British upper crust in the final years prior to The Great War. It tells the story of the life of a younger son of a noble, but chronically short of cash, family. He is known to his friends and family by the initial "C". He falls under the spell of a married woman who is as self centered as she is beautiful. She revels in the attentions of well to do men who help finance her lifestyle in exchange for her time. Her husband is such a cypher that he barely appears in the novel. C ends up devoting and wasting his life in pursuit of her favors. Remember no sex is mentioned, her favors are portrayed as her granting him the pleasure of taking her to the theater, sitting near her at dinners, long conversations and other such trivialities.
If I had read this as a much younger man, I perhaps would have described is as the story of a would be writer with the soul of an artist losing himself to an impossible love. Instead today I see it as the story of a fool who refuses to see the truth about the object of his affections. He casts aside real chances for love with better persons, and opportunities to follow his dream of living as a writer.

Even though the characters are separated from me by time and wealth, his gift is to make then arise from the page as real people. My one complaint about this book is the editor's assumption that if you are reading this book you must be sophisticated enough to read French. No translations are offered to the numerous French quotes that appear throughout the book.

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 2 out of 5]

In Somerset Maugham's first novel, "Of human bondage", Philip Carey is a young, poor student of Medicine who falls desperately in love with a low social level girl. In this novel by Maurice Baring, Caryl Bramsley (C) also falls desperately in love with another man-eater woman, but in this case both belong to good families. Another important difference between the two books is the fact that Philip gets rid of his slavery, while C never gets out of it and is destroyed by the relation.

An interesting point is the fact that C is separated from his love by his own long-lost brother, who happens to be like him in all those things that she liked, and different in those she did not like (such as his culture and education).

While I was reading this book I wondered what is the point of writing about the life of a man with so little self-control, who lives a more-or-less pointless life.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

The character C has his moments but he's too impossible to believe unless his story is meant as an Allegory For Why A Pseudo Intellectual Did Not Formally Convert to the Faith. But there are actually no true intellectual points against Catholicism, just man's fallen nature. I could buy that C is a composite meant as a critique of Baring's generation. But the moping about and pining after the odious Leila recalls Proust's Odette, but without any actual decisive action on C's part to claim her. While there were plenty of well written parts its ultimately unsatisfying to read a novel where something is on the brink of happening but in the end nothing does. Also what's with all the ragging on Wagner? Silly English.

[Almachius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful.

[Ross-Barry Barcock. · Rating 5 out of 5]

That was a long read. I struggled at times but the curiosity to see how 'C's' life turned-out made proceed to the end.

[Chris Fellows]

As others have pointed out, this book heavily mines the autobiographical vein of 'The Puppet Show of Memory', so having read it before this one there were a lot of unsettling echoes. If I was a friend or relation of Maurice Baring, I don't know how comfortable I would have been seeing my fictionalised counterpart in this book. Probably not very. But, as I am no friend or relation of Maurice Baring, who died long before I was born, this is not a problem for me. Whew!

I have elected not to rate this book because I have the feeling it is my fault that I don't know what it about. It seems a possibility that underneath all the prattle and to-ing and fro-ing and name-dropping and tedious conversations about actresses I know not what of, it could be something like 'None Other Gods', about the spiritual journey of the title character. Or maybe about the spiritual journey not taken.

It was worth reading just for the poem at the end, which articulates well something that has always bothered me:

They say we'll meet in some transfigured space,
Beyond the sun.
I need you here, in this familiar place
Of tears and fun.
I do not need you changed, dissolved in air;
Nor rarified;
I need you all imperfect as you were
Here, at my side.

I kept expecting something to happen, but it never really did. When C gets sent off to be a reporter in the Boer War, I was thinking 'Yes! Now he will have to grow up and do something interesting!' But if he did, it was left offstage. Sigh... And if it was about a spiritual journey, it was a pity he just seemed to be starting to get somewhere when he died. :(

[Inês · Rating 4 out of 5]

A escrita não é nada de especial mas deu mais de meia hora a olhar para o tecto a digerir o final do livro. Absurdamente relatable. 4,5/5

[Steve Vetsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great character driven story. Not fast paced, but interesting.