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Sinister Street
Sinister Street was first published in two volumes, the first in 1913, the second in the following year. Henry James, in a letter to Hugh Walpole, described it as “really a very interesting and remarkable performance… at one and the same time so extremely young… and so confoundingly mature.”
In an article, he named Compton Mackenzie as one of the four young novelists most likely to sustain the greatest traditions of English fiction.
Year by year the novel has sold steadily and established itself as one of the classics of its age. It is the story of a young man who passed through a public school and Oxford in the first decade of this century and whose experiences culminated in the byways of London, and it has been justly described by Mr. Frank Swinnerton as “the record of a departed generation”. But, while manners and conditions have changed, its appeal retains the same force for every succeeding generation, because the story is concerned with the perpetual problems of romantic youth.
In an article, he named Compton Mackenzie as one of the four young novelists most likely to sustain the greatest traditions of English fiction.
Year by year the novel has sold steadily and established itself as one of the classics of its age. It is the story of a young man who passed through a public school and Oxford in the first decade of this century and whose experiences culminated in the byways of London, and it has been justly described by Mr. Frank Swinnerton as “the record of a departed generation”. But, while manners and conditions have changed, its appeal retains the same force for every succeeding generation, because the story is concerned with the perpetual problems of romantic youth.
832 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1913
17 people are currently reading
446 people want to read
About the author
Compton Mackenzie
211 books84 followersCompton Mackenzie was born into a theatrical family. His father, Edward Compton, was an actor and theatre company manager; his sister, Fay Compton, starred in many of James M. Barrie's plays, including Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up. He was educated at St Paul's School and Magdalen College, Oxford where he obtained a degree in Modern History.
Mackenzie was married three times and aside from his writing also worked as an actor, political activist, and broadcaster. He served with British Intelligence in the Eastern Mediterranean during World War I, later publishing four books on his experiences. Compton Mackenzie was from 1920–1923 Tenant of Herm and Jethou and he shares many similarities to the central character in D.H. Lawrence's short story The Man Who Loved Islands, despite Lawrence saying "the man is no more he than I am." Mackenzie at first asked Secker, who published both authors, not to print the story and it was left out of one collection.
Mackenzie was married three times and aside from his writing also worked as an actor, political activist, and broadcaster. He served with British Intelligence in the Eastern Mediterranean during World War I, later publishing four books on his experiences. Compton Mackenzie was from 1920–1923 Tenant of Herm and Jethou and he shares many similarities to the central character in D.H. Lawrence's short story The Man Who Loved Islands, despite Lawrence saying "the man is no more he than I am." Mackenzie at first asked Secker, who published both authors, not to print the story and it was left out of one collection.
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January 15, 2026Not sure why GoodReads decided The cover for this book should be the one resembling a dimestore romance but....
This is a book that F. Scott Fitzgerald recommended in his College of One, a set of 40 books he considered necessary for an education: https://www.listchallenges.com/f-scot...
Unannotated Book in F. Scott Fitzgerald's College of One
A Book Owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald: https://static-prod.lib.princeton.edu...
This is a book that F. Scott Fitzgerald recommended in his College of One, a set of 40 books he considered necessary for an education: https://www.listchallenges.com/f-scot...
Unannotated Book in F. Scott Fitzgerald's College of One
A Book Owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald: https://static-prod.lib.princeton.edu...
March 29, 2013
“Sinister Street”
a bildungsroman by Compton Mackenzie
I read the first hundred pages of this gigantic novel in awe that its sparkling text could have been written over a hundred years ago. Mirroring Joyce's near-contemporary “Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man”, “Sinister Street” goes further, beefing up childhood impressions with deep probes into the psychology of the quixotic child, Michael Fane, as he grows from toddler to man about town. Also, there is great prose, much of it landscape, which almost always avoids the purple.
But not the purple cloth. Mackenzie was one of that triumvirate of Roman Catholic convert authors (the others being Graham Green and Evelyn Waugh). I was dismayed with the boy's religious fanaticism dominating the next two hundred pages. Precocious even by Joyce's standards, Michael Fane's curious admixture of faith, bookishness and larks stood him on the Irishman's shoulders, rather, as if at twelve he were already the Victorian equivalent of Compleat Man. Wallowing through all this religiosity, I began to apply the formula of seven deadly virtues to Compton Mackenzie's literary boasts. Deadly because seen from the outside as negative, in Fane's world these virtues are untainted by vice. Snob (as amalgam of pride and prejudice), prig, braggadocio, zealot, hypocrite, smug & glib. From a famous public school in London, to an exclusive college in Oxford then on into the slums of Pimlico, Michael Fane lives according to the above codes in order to retain the title of gentleman. Even punching a copper and spending the night in the Bow Street cells fails to tarnish his self esteem and righteousness.
Pre-dating “Brideshead Revisited” by three decades, “Sinister Street” is said to be the quintessential portrait of undergraduate life at Oxford. From the viewpoint of Michael Fane's snob, almost everyone deserves looking down on: street boys, Rhodes Scholars, peers whose tastes he deplores. Even his taste in girls suffers from an entropy of sneer. Attracted to those who set out to attract, Michael is sooner or later appalled by their contrariness and crashes out of his slumming ways.
The title puzzled me for hundreds and hundreds of pages; presumably it was meant to. The Fane family (Charles Michael Saxby Fane, his semi-pro pianist sister Stella and their unmarried mother) do move about somewhat; so at each of Michael's new locations I paused to think if it were the eponymous street. One thing that does not wander at all is the point of view, which doggedly remains Michael's. This is an achievement, enduring over two hundred thousand words; but his cut-glass world view distorts as well as reveals. Not quite in a sinister way, I should add.
This novel is so long, it becomes writing above fiction. What's more it begs sequels; and the sequence of three it begot (“Plasher's Mead”, “Sylva Scarlett”, “Syvia and Michael”) was only curtailed by The Great War. Other than that, it's a veritable Downton Abbey of industry over craft, a voluminous Victorian handbag of a work. Yet it is not all told. Which probably inspired Orwell to go “Down and Out” on crusading slums of his own; and as in there, we are left by caesuras to guess what peccadilloes dared not speak their names. The novel's popularity (stayed in print for most of the twentieth century) is partly down to the censorship of popular libraries followed by championship by the Daily Mail. Many were the boarding school bums caned for possessing it, but it was never banned outright like DH Lawrence's more explicit work. In truth, the (orignally) two volumes are very long on the results of adultery but rather short on their details.
Having deprecated the hero, I must say the romantic vision of Lily is irresistible, despite her sloth. In Fane's smitten shoes, I would have been tempted to take old Mrs Carthew's advice and “beat her figuratively for a year” lest she became “a shrew or a whiner”. But in the pursuance of his romantic dream, he is incapable of taking good advice, only bad. Whether he marries her is not revealed until very near the end of the book (829 pages in my battered 1969 Penguin paperback). Like with further episodes of Downton, I ponder taking in the sequels - lifetime permitting.
a bildungsroman by Compton Mackenzie
I read the first hundred pages of this gigantic novel in awe that its sparkling text could have been written over a hundred years ago. Mirroring Joyce's near-contemporary “Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man”, “Sinister Street” goes further, beefing up childhood impressions with deep probes into the psychology of the quixotic child, Michael Fane, as he grows from toddler to man about town. Also, there is great prose, much of it landscape, which almost always avoids the purple.
But not the purple cloth. Mackenzie was one of that triumvirate of Roman Catholic convert authors (the others being Graham Green and Evelyn Waugh). I was dismayed with the boy's religious fanaticism dominating the next two hundred pages. Precocious even by Joyce's standards, Michael Fane's curious admixture of faith, bookishness and larks stood him on the Irishman's shoulders, rather, as if at twelve he were already the Victorian equivalent of Compleat Man. Wallowing through all this religiosity, I began to apply the formula of seven deadly virtues to Compton Mackenzie's literary boasts. Deadly because seen from the outside as negative, in Fane's world these virtues are untainted by vice. Snob (as amalgam of pride and prejudice), prig, braggadocio, zealot, hypocrite, smug & glib. From a famous public school in London, to an exclusive college in Oxford then on into the slums of Pimlico, Michael Fane lives according to the above codes in order to retain the title of gentleman. Even punching a copper and spending the night in the Bow Street cells fails to tarnish his self esteem and righteousness.
Pre-dating “Brideshead Revisited” by three decades, “Sinister Street” is said to be the quintessential portrait of undergraduate life at Oxford. From the viewpoint of Michael Fane's snob, almost everyone deserves looking down on: street boys, Rhodes Scholars, peers whose tastes he deplores. Even his taste in girls suffers from an entropy of sneer. Attracted to those who set out to attract, Michael is sooner or later appalled by their contrariness and crashes out of his slumming ways.
The title puzzled me for hundreds and hundreds of pages; presumably it was meant to. The Fane family (Charles Michael Saxby Fane, his semi-pro pianist sister Stella and their unmarried mother) do move about somewhat; so at each of Michael's new locations I paused to think if it were the eponymous street. One thing that does not wander at all is the point of view, which doggedly remains Michael's. This is an achievement, enduring over two hundred thousand words; but his cut-glass world view distorts as well as reveals. Not quite in a sinister way, I should add.
This novel is so long, it becomes writing above fiction. What's more it begs sequels; and the sequence of three it begot (“Plasher's Mead”, “Sylva Scarlett”, “Syvia and Michael”) was only curtailed by The Great War. Other than that, it's a veritable Downton Abbey of industry over craft, a voluminous Victorian handbag of a work. Yet it is not all told. Which probably inspired Orwell to go “Down and Out” on crusading slums of his own; and as in there, we are left by caesuras to guess what peccadilloes dared not speak their names. The novel's popularity (stayed in print for most of the twentieth century) is partly down to the censorship of popular libraries followed by championship by the Daily Mail. Many were the boarding school bums caned for possessing it, but it was never banned outright like DH Lawrence's more explicit work. In truth, the (orignally) two volumes are very long on the results of adultery but rather short on their details.
Having deprecated the hero, I must say the romantic vision of Lily is irresistible, despite her sloth. In Fane's smitten shoes, I would have been tempted to take old Mrs Carthew's advice and “beat her figuratively for a year” lest she became “a shrew or a whiner”. But in the pursuance of his romantic dream, he is incapable of taking good advice, only bad. Whether he marries her is not revealed until very near the end of the book (829 pages in my battered 1969 Penguin paperback). Like with further episodes of Downton, I ponder taking in the sequels - lifetime permitting.
December 30, 2025
Persnickety Galore!
First things first, this is an incredibly long book, a thousand page Bildungsroman about a generally unpleasant and not even particularly interesting toff who, despite his entitled upbringing and the advantages of the best education Edwardian England had to offer, achieves precisely nothing by the end of the book.
Michael Fane is a snobbish, patronising, nanny-raised public schoolboy-educated prig with a kind but distant mother and a precocious younger sister. He doesn't know who his father is, it turns out that he is the illegitimate son of a married nobleman with whom his mother has been having a long-term affair, hence the first meaning behind the 'sinister' in the title.
Originally the novel was published in two parts but Mackenzie states in his foreword that he intended it to be a single book, so I have decided to review it as such. The first part follows young Michael from boyhood, through public school and up to the point of his entry to Oxford University.
Entitled or not, the experience of childhood is pretty much the same for all of us. Michael looks up to his mother, is condescending towards his younger sibling, plays with his toy soldiers, feels lonely at times and suffers from night terrors:
'First of all he had to concentrate on closing his mouth when asleep, because Annie had told him a tale about a woman who slept with her mouth open, the result of which bad habit was that one night a mouse ran down it and choked her.'
He finds comfort in the solitary delights of juvenile literature, Robinson Crusoe, the adventure stories of G. A. Henty and most significantly in Don Quixote, which remains a touchstone throughout his entire youth. Deprived of close parenting and finding refuge in books, he develops a melancholic strain:
'Michael's only ambition was to live in his own world.'
Initially he finds the transition to residency at exclusive St. James public school difficult, then fits in fairly well. (God I'm glad I didn't have to go to be of those places!) He makes one or two friends before finding Alan Merivale, a less imaginative foil for his more ambitious flights of fancy. Much of the culture there involves the conflict between budding 'Oxtails' and 'Cabbage-stalks':
'They shouted to one another from the heart of massed factions mocking rhymes. Michael would chant:
"Oxford upstairs eating all the cakes; Cambridge downstairs licking up the plates."
To which Buckley would retort:
"Cambridge, rowing on and on for ever; Oxford in a matchbox floating down the river."
Mackenzie himself was a Catholic, I believe, and it's entirety appropriate that his fictional alter ego should become attracted to the lofty sacraments of the High Church, which have always attracted those with a sense of their own preciousness. Catholicism 'assured him of continuity and shrouded him with a sensuous austerity.'
Though naturally intelligent, Michael becomes increasingly indolent and decadent. I greatly enjoyed every time he was dressed down by Dr Brownjohn, the corrosively eloquent headmaster of St. James's, e.g. "You could be the finest scholar in the school, and you're merely a coruscation of slatternly, slipshod paste."
Very much poisoned with a young man's callow misogyny up to the point of his entry to Oxford, he falls hopelessly in love with a beautiful featherhead named Lily Baden, who will become the object of his quixotic slumming around the more salubrious areas of London in the second part (the other connotation behind the title).
Grown to adulthood by this time, he's still a largely dislikeable individual, though he doesn't lack for friends to share his hopes and fears with. I realize that my review up until this point seems to suggest that I didn't enjoy the book. Far from it. I should make it clear that I recognised much of myself in Michael, as I'm sure many young men must have at the time. I wasn't very likable either, adopting and rejecting people and ideas with a bluntness which embarrasses me now. But I was sincerely searching for something, just like he was:
"I know that all these people at Cobble Place are all right," he groaned. "I know that, just as I know Virgil is a great poet. But I never knew Virgil was great until I read Swinburne. Oh, I want to be calm and splendid and proud of myself, but I want to understand life while I'm alive. I want to believe in immortality, but in case I never can be convinced of it, I want to be convinced of something. Everything seems to be tumbling down nowadays. What's so absurd is that nobody can understand anybody else, let alone the universe. Mrs. Ross can understand why I like Alan, but she can't understand why I want love. Viner can understand why I get depressed, but he can't understand why I can't be cured immediately. Wilmot could understand why I wanted to read his rotten books, but he can't understand why the South African War upset me. And so on with everybody. I'm determined to understand everybody," Michael vowed, "even if I can't have faith," he sighed to the four counties.
Still unsure of himself, Michael enters Oxford, 'this dream of youth's domination set against the gray background of time's endurance that was itself spun of the fabric of dreams.' He's tailor-made for its timeless sense of exceptionalism.
I didn't enjoy the second half of the novel as much as the first, however. Oxford wasn't the problem. I appreciated Michaels deep love for his Alma Mater, liked the affectionate portrayal of the various done, no doubt based on real-life examples, and was frankly jealous of the life afforded to an Edwardian student of the great university.
No, the twofold problems with second half of Sinister Street were something else. Firstly, Michaels sister Stella has also grown-up by now, and she is far more interesting and sympathetic than he is. A prodigy on the piano, she lives a bohemian lifestyle in Paris which Michael is sneeringly dismissive about.
Not that he doesn't admire his sister. She's not only more talented than Michael, she is also quicker to understand the vaguerries of their mother's character and situation. I believe that Mackenzie deliberately made Stella more likable than Michael. This is nothing if not a brave book in that respect.
'As for Stella, apart from the simplicity of her coloring, it was less easy to find physically a resemblance to the piano, and yet how well her personality consorted with one. Were she ignorant of the instrument, it would still be possible to compare her to a piano with her character so self-contained and cool and ordered that yet, played upon by people or circumstances, could reveal with such decorous poignancy the emotion beneath, emotion, however, that was always kept under control, as in a piano the pressure or release of a pedal can swell or quell the most expressive chord.'
She's a free spirit and he's a stick-in-the-mud. He's not lacking in self awareness, and Stella certainly helps him to see who he is. After visiting her 'he accused himself in fact of snobbishness, and justified the snobbishness by applying it to undergraduate Oxford as a persistent attribute.' There's nothing insincere in that. He is, and it is.
He glides through Oxford without ever really extending himself. Typically he helps his friends establish a literary magazine and never bothers to write a single article, despite his intelligence and all their efforts to conjole him. But he still searches for something:
'Oh, this clutching at the soul by truth, how damnably instantaneous it was, how for one moment it could provoke the illusion of victory over all the muddled facts of existence: how a moment after it could leave the tantalized soul with a despairing sense of having missed by the breadth of a hair the entry into knowledge.'
After graduation he catches a brief glimpse of Lily from afar, learns that she may have become a high-class prostitute and begins to look for her. In want of a vocation he gives himself up to 'that ancient lure of the shades.'
His guide is the disreputable Henry Meats, who he had met hiding out in a monastery in the first part. Stella and Alan sorry that he is about to do something stupid so he doesn't let them know where he is. Unable to find what he wants in art, religion or work, 'all his hopes, all his quixotry, all his capacity for idealization, all his prejudice and impulsiveness converged upon her.'
He finds her after a series of misadventures, but the search - like all his questing - proves to be a disappointing failure, not just for him but for the narrative also (the second failure). Maybe an Oxford graduate submerging himself in the seamier side of life was controversial back then, not now though. This closing part of the book was longer than it deserved to be, and pretty tame by modern standards.
And so by the end of a novel almost as long as Ulysses and War and Peace, Michael hasn't achieved a thing and is no closer to finding out what he wants to be. But what had you achieved by the age of twenty-three? Maybe a lot, but I sure as hell hadn't.
Figures as diverse as F. Scott Fitzgerald and George Orwell were disciples of this book, and for all its faults I can understand why. Most young men are selfish iconoclasts with nothing much to offer the world, some just have more opportunity to indulge themselves. I'll leave the last word to Michael Fane himself:
"You'll never do anything," Alan prophesied. "Because you'll always be doubting."
"I might get rid finally of that sense of insecurity," Michael pointed out. "With all doubts and hesitations I'm perfectly convinced of one great factor in human life—the necessity to follow the impulse which lies deeper than any reason."
First things first, this is an incredibly long book, a thousand page Bildungsroman about a generally unpleasant and not even particularly interesting toff who, despite his entitled upbringing and the advantages of the best education Edwardian England had to offer, achieves precisely nothing by the end of the book.
Michael Fane is a snobbish, patronising, nanny-raised public schoolboy-educated prig with a kind but distant mother and a precocious younger sister. He doesn't know who his father is, it turns out that he is the illegitimate son of a married nobleman with whom his mother has been having a long-term affair, hence the first meaning behind the 'sinister' in the title.
Originally the novel was published in two parts but Mackenzie states in his foreword that he intended it to be a single book, so I have decided to review it as such. The first part follows young Michael from boyhood, through public school and up to the point of his entry to Oxford University.
Entitled or not, the experience of childhood is pretty much the same for all of us. Michael looks up to his mother, is condescending towards his younger sibling, plays with his toy soldiers, feels lonely at times and suffers from night terrors:
'First of all he had to concentrate on closing his mouth when asleep, because Annie had told him a tale about a woman who slept with her mouth open, the result of which bad habit was that one night a mouse ran down it and choked her.'
He finds comfort in the solitary delights of juvenile literature, Robinson Crusoe, the adventure stories of G. A. Henty and most significantly in Don Quixote, which remains a touchstone throughout his entire youth. Deprived of close parenting and finding refuge in books, he develops a melancholic strain:
'Michael's only ambition was to live in his own world.'
Initially he finds the transition to residency at exclusive St. James public school difficult, then fits in fairly well. (God I'm glad I didn't have to go to be of those places!) He makes one or two friends before finding Alan Merivale, a less imaginative foil for his more ambitious flights of fancy. Much of the culture there involves the conflict between budding 'Oxtails' and 'Cabbage-stalks':
'They shouted to one another from the heart of massed factions mocking rhymes. Michael would chant:
"Oxford upstairs eating all the cakes; Cambridge downstairs licking up the plates."
To which Buckley would retort:
"Cambridge, rowing on and on for ever; Oxford in a matchbox floating down the river."
Mackenzie himself was a Catholic, I believe, and it's entirety appropriate that his fictional alter ego should become attracted to the lofty sacraments of the High Church, which have always attracted those with a sense of their own preciousness. Catholicism 'assured him of continuity and shrouded him with a sensuous austerity.'
Though naturally intelligent, Michael becomes increasingly indolent and decadent. I greatly enjoyed every time he was dressed down by Dr Brownjohn, the corrosively eloquent headmaster of St. James's, e.g. "You could be the finest scholar in the school, and you're merely a coruscation of slatternly, slipshod paste."
Very much poisoned with a young man's callow misogyny up to the point of his entry to Oxford, he falls hopelessly in love with a beautiful featherhead named Lily Baden, who will become the object of his quixotic slumming around the more salubrious areas of London in the second part (the other connotation behind the title).
Grown to adulthood by this time, he's still a largely dislikeable individual, though he doesn't lack for friends to share his hopes and fears with. I realize that my review up until this point seems to suggest that I didn't enjoy the book. Far from it. I should make it clear that I recognised much of myself in Michael, as I'm sure many young men must have at the time. I wasn't very likable either, adopting and rejecting people and ideas with a bluntness which embarrasses me now. But I was sincerely searching for something, just like he was:
"I know that all these people at Cobble Place are all right," he groaned. "I know that, just as I know Virgil is a great poet. But I never knew Virgil was great until I read Swinburne. Oh, I want to be calm and splendid and proud of myself, but I want to understand life while I'm alive. I want to believe in immortality, but in case I never can be convinced of it, I want to be convinced of something. Everything seems to be tumbling down nowadays. What's so absurd is that nobody can understand anybody else, let alone the universe. Mrs. Ross can understand why I like Alan, but she can't understand why I want love. Viner can understand why I get depressed, but he can't understand why I can't be cured immediately. Wilmot could understand why I wanted to read his rotten books, but he can't understand why the South African War upset me. And so on with everybody. I'm determined to understand everybody," Michael vowed, "even if I can't have faith," he sighed to the four counties.
Still unsure of himself, Michael enters Oxford, 'this dream of youth's domination set against the gray background of time's endurance that was itself spun of the fabric of dreams.' He's tailor-made for its timeless sense of exceptionalism.
I didn't enjoy the second half of the novel as much as the first, however. Oxford wasn't the problem. I appreciated Michaels deep love for his Alma Mater, liked the affectionate portrayal of the various done, no doubt based on real-life examples, and was frankly jealous of the life afforded to an Edwardian student of the great university.
No, the twofold problems with second half of Sinister Street were something else. Firstly, Michaels sister Stella has also grown-up by now, and she is far more interesting and sympathetic than he is. A prodigy on the piano, she lives a bohemian lifestyle in Paris which Michael is sneeringly dismissive about.
Not that he doesn't admire his sister. She's not only more talented than Michael, she is also quicker to understand the vaguerries of their mother's character and situation. I believe that Mackenzie deliberately made Stella more likable than Michael. This is nothing if not a brave book in that respect.
'As for Stella, apart from the simplicity of her coloring, it was less easy to find physically a resemblance to the piano, and yet how well her personality consorted with one. Were she ignorant of the instrument, it would still be possible to compare her to a piano with her character so self-contained and cool and ordered that yet, played upon by people or circumstances, could reveal with such decorous poignancy the emotion beneath, emotion, however, that was always kept under control, as in a piano the pressure or release of a pedal can swell or quell the most expressive chord.'
She's a free spirit and he's a stick-in-the-mud. He's not lacking in self awareness, and Stella certainly helps him to see who he is. After visiting her 'he accused himself in fact of snobbishness, and justified the snobbishness by applying it to undergraduate Oxford as a persistent attribute.' There's nothing insincere in that. He is, and it is.
He glides through Oxford without ever really extending himself. Typically he helps his friends establish a literary magazine and never bothers to write a single article, despite his intelligence and all their efforts to conjole him. But he still searches for something:
'Oh, this clutching at the soul by truth, how damnably instantaneous it was, how for one moment it could provoke the illusion of victory over all the muddled facts of existence: how a moment after it could leave the tantalized soul with a despairing sense of having missed by the breadth of a hair the entry into knowledge.'
After graduation he catches a brief glimpse of Lily from afar, learns that she may have become a high-class prostitute and begins to look for her. In want of a vocation he gives himself up to 'that ancient lure of the shades.'
His guide is the disreputable Henry Meats, who he had met hiding out in a monastery in the first part. Stella and Alan sorry that he is about to do something stupid so he doesn't let them know where he is. Unable to find what he wants in art, religion or work, 'all his hopes, all his quixotry, all his capacity for idealization, all his prejudice and impulsiveness converged upon her.'
He finds her after a series of misadventures, but the search - like all his questing - proves to be a disappointing failure, not just for him but for the narrative also (the second failure). Maybe an Oxford graduate submerging himself in the seamier side of life was controversial back then, not now though. This closing part of the book was longer than it deserved to be, and pretty tame by modern standards.
And so by the end of a novel almost as long as Ulysses and War and Peace, Michael hasn't achieved a thing and is no closer to finding out what he wants to be. But what had you achieved by the age of twenty-three? Maybe a lot, but I sure as hell hadn't.
Figures as diverse as F. Scott Fitzgerald and George Orwell were disciples of this book, and for all its faults I can understand why. Most young men are selfish iconoclasts with nothing much to offer the world, some just have more opportunity to indulge themselves. I'll leave the last word to Michael Fane himself:
"You'll never do anything," Alan prophesied. "Because you'll always be doubting."
"I might get rid finally of that sense of insecurity," Michael pointed out. "With all doubts and hesitations I'm perfectly convinced of one great factor in human life—the necessity to follow the impulse which lies deeper than any reason."
September 23, 2008
Loved it. Dense & rich. Contempletive pace... challenging language. Felt modern & alive, but decidedly from another time... Historically interesting, but not stuffy. I was captivated...
October 19, 2015
superb ... an utterly beautiful novel. It has given me more to think about than any other book I have read this year.
May 13, 2017
This book was on the list Scott Fitzgerald put together for his mistress Sheila Graham to educate her about literature. That could be the reason why people seek it out today, a century after it came out. But I imagine not everyone who picks it up finishes it. Who wants to read more than 1100 pages of the coming of age of a talented, lazy, naive restless youth as he matures oh so slowly? The prose is ornate and latinate, overripe for current taste. The plot seems formless until many of the strands are woven together in the last quarter of the book (Book IV). But there are delights for those who persist. The book opens with a successful depiction of an infant’s point-of-view (notoriously difficult to pull off). Book III contains a loving description of the indolent life of the privileged at Oxford, which somehow yields something like an education. There are good set pieces, as when the protagonist reads Keats on St Mark’s Eve in his Oxford room and deliberates on the attempt to freeze time by aesthetic expression or when he challenges two of his classmates who become priests on the mission of the church. There are some insights that by themselves are worth the price of admission, as when the protagonist’s sister Stella, training to become a concert pianist, tells him “I don’t think I’ve got a soul, because when I play I go rushing out into the darkness to look for my soul, and the better I play the nearer I get.” Most of all, I enjoyed the homage to other works of literature. The protagonist, Michael Fane, is a reincarnated Don Quixote, plopped into London at the cusp of the 20th century; other points of reference include Dante and Manon Lescaut. The two volumes have been sitting patiently on my shelf since I purchased them in pre-Internet days in a used bookstore in London, and I’m glad I finally took the time to savor them. A good read.
September 10, 2018
An absolutely absorbing account of growing up: I've never read such a convincing description of a small child's fears and distortions of everyday things. As Michael grows up, he does all the silly things you could think of but remains immensely likeable. There is a host of characters who appear and recede and sometimes reappear: the Oxford sections are horribly credible, and the scenes of low life in London find plenty of echoes today. This is a massive book, but well worth the time spent reading it.
April 5, 2017
I read this because I discovered it was one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's favorite books prior to him writing This Side of Paradise. As a matter of fact, some critics have said it is the son of Sinister Street. I even saw elements of Gatsby in its pages. Fitzgerald was still following Mackenzie at least through 1925, when Gatsby was published.
Sinister Street first of all is a monster of a book at 921 pages, though I read it on a Kindle, which has its advantages. I could not help but think of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The first two-thirds of Sinister Street has the same rambling style. The young Michael Fane has a privileged upbringing as he matriculates through one of England's famed independent private schools and then to another famed undergraduate college at Oxford University. Other critics have said that this book is the quintessential book on undergraduate student life at Oxford. It is all about Junior Common Room, drinking squash, student run newspapers, cricket, rowing, class ranking, and building your personal library, which young Michael is very good at—especially when it comes to Don Quixote, which become quite pivotal when he leaves Oxford.
I am in the dark as to what Sinister Street refers to, until I get to volume two, which in the UK version is actually called Sinister Street. At this point the pace picks up and I realized that the first 75% of the book was all prelude. The last 25% is where the real meat is—quite literally. Based on the pace and content of Volume 2 I would be willing to tackle the two Sylvia and Michael sequels, as well as Plashers Mead.
June 9, 2020
This is an exceptionally good and very influential novel (Henry James praised it; Scott Fitzgerald and Evelyn Waugh loved it and made use of it - almost plagiarized it - in "This Side of Paradise" and "Brideshead Revisited").
It appeared at the same time as Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" and it is lucky for both Maugham and Mackenzie that their novels were published so close together that neither could be accused of stealing from the other. The great critic Edmund Wilson thought Mackenzie was a much better writer than Maugham. I rate them - in their best work - on a par, and very highly: "SS" and "OHB" are in my view major novels.
Like "Of Human Bondage,""Sinister Street" is one of the last great triple-decker "young man's coming of age" novels, with a ravishing central section evoking life at Oxford in the early 1900's. Mackenzie was very versatile (he founded "Gramophone Magazine"), and deserves rediscovery. I've also read "Carnival," "Guy and Pauline," and "Thin Ice" - all very much worth reading, but so far "Sinister Street" remains my favorite.
It appeared at the same time as Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" and it is lucky for both Maugham and Mackenzie that their novels were published so close together that neither could be accused of stealing from the other. The great critic Edmund Wilson thought Mackenzie was a much better writer than Maugham. I rate them - in their best work - on a par, and very highly: "SS" and "OHB" are in my view major novels.
Like "Of Human Bondage,""Sinister Street" is one of the last great triple-decker "young man's coming of age" novels, with a ravishing central section evoking life at Oxford in the early 1900's. Mackenzie was very versatile (he founded "Gramophone Magazine"), and deserves rediscovery. I've also read "Carnival," "Guy and Pauline," and "Thin Ice" - all very much worth reading, but so far "Sinister Street" remains my favorite.
February 20, 2015
I read this book nearly 40 years ago and have revisited it several times since. I read a number of bildungsromans around the time I first read Sinister Street: The Lonely Unicorn, Of Human Bondage, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, etc.
What set this one apart was that Michael Fane really seemed to grow up. He went from a reasonable child to an objedtionable, priggish teen, and the novel ends with him contemplating a column in Rome: "All that I have done and experienced so far would not scratch this stone."
It sets up an echo for one of early images of this 1000+ page book, when Michael as a toddler he considers the iron bars of his crib:
". . .for Michael each bar possessed a personality. Minute scratches unnoticed by the heedless adult world lent variety of expression. . . ."
MacKenzie's writing is surprisingly pacey and the scenes and characters well-observed, and some of them, like Sylvia Scarlett and Lily Haden, memorable.
What set this one apart was that Michael Fane really seemed to grow up. He went from a reasonable child to an objedtionable, priggish teen, and the novel ends with him contemplating a column in Rome: "All that I have done and experienced so far would not scratch this stone."
It sets up an echo for one of early images of this 1000+ page book, when Michael as a toddler he considers the iron bars of his crib:
". . .for Michael each bar possessed a personality. Minute scratches unnoticed by the heedless adult world lent variety of expression. . . ."
MacKenzie's writing is surprisingly pacey and the scenes and characters well-observed, and some of them, like Sylvia Scarlett and Lily Haden, memorable.
May 6, 2022
A worthwhile re-read for me. This is, I suppose, a largely forgotten book by a largely forgotten author. Which is a pity, because, in as much as it seems to belong to a world made to appear distant and hazy by the mists of time, it nonetheless has flashes of insight to offer the reader, and passages that still strike a surprising resonance with the modern world. I wish I'd been thoughtful enough to mark them out, but Oxford and the Bullingdon are still with us, and at the heart of the nation's ruling classes, and Mackenzie's portrayal of the underworld still rings true. Michael Fane remains a curiously elusive character, part David Coperfield, part pilgrim. He illuminates his environment in such a way that the subsidiary characters of the novel often appear more substantial than he does, but I'm sure this is deliberate. The novel concludes with the idea that we are all too much invested in the business of others to be fully realised in ourselves.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 20, 2023
A great and loving novel by a top-tier stylist. Michael Fane is precocious and endearing; nearly as often, he is woefully, comically ignorant. Mackenzie is clearly a lover of strange words (a few of my favorites: mucid, reasty, rutilant, spumy, fuscous, fuliginous, tatterdemalion) and has a wonderful ability to crystallize the strange loveliness of childhood. A true shame that Penguin has let this one fall out of print.
May 3, 2025
A quintessential English Bildungsroman, in which you grow to love and identify with the main character, Michael Fane.
Sinister street refers to Carlington Road in London. At the beginning of Volume One, Michael, his sister Stella and their mother take up residence in a thin red house on that street, surrounded by coal heaps and a railway. Their mother is mostly absent, their father an unknown entity.
In Volume Two, Michael enjoys the greater freedom of a public school. He grows contradictory and self-assertive, though with a growing anxiety about his origins. This is the age of absolute boyhood glory, in which he identifies with and glorifies his friend Alan. There's also a budding interest in religion and spiritual experience. Michael's sensitive temperament is revealed, as he suffers his first heartbreak and falls in love with Lily, an empty-headed flirt. At the end of this Volume, Michael learns that his father (a lord) has recently been killed in the Boer War and that he has in fact old blood running through his veins.
Volume Three sees another transition in Michael's life: life at Oxford University. This book is crammed with college experiences: the regular beatings, the dinners, the new friendships, the Common Room evenings.
In Volume Four, Michael is educated romantically. As he learns that his former girlfriend Lily is now degraded (a streetwalker), he decides to find her and marry her. In his enormous capacity for idealisation, Michael decides to test his academic values. He descends into the underworld, takes up rooms in sinister Leppard Street, where he experiences the inversion of society as he has known it so far. When he finds Lily, his mother, sister and friends heavily oppose their marriage, which is eventually called off as Lily turns out to be cheating him. This final volume is somehow a turndown: Michael, with his quixotic nature, is overtly naive, the picture of the 'underworld' too stereotypical. And why, o why, is Michael's only remedy for his heartbreak the contemplation of priesthood?
Sinister street refers to Carlington Road in London. At the beginning of Volume One, Michael, his sister Stella and their mother take up residence in a thin red house on that street, surrounded by coal heaps and a railway. Their mother is mostly absent, their father an unknown entity.
In Volume Two, Michael enjoys the greater freedom of a public school. He grows contradictory and self-assertive, though with a growing anxiety about his origins. This is the age of absolute boyhood glory, in which he identifies with and glorifies his friend Alan. There's also a budding interest in religion and spiritual experience. Michael's sensitive temperament is revealed, as he suffers his first heartbreak and falls in love with Lily, an empty-headed flirt. At the end of this Volume, Michael learns that his father (a lord) has recently been killed in the Boer War and that he has in fact old blood running through his veins.
Volume Three sees another transition in Michael's life: life at Oxford University. This book is crammed with college experiences: the regular beatings, the dinners, the new friendships, the Common Room evenings.
In Volume Four, Michael is educated romantically. As he learns that his former girlfriend Lily is now degraded (a streetwalker), he decides to find her and marry her. In his enormous capacity for idealisation, Michael decides to test his academic values. He descends into the underworld, takes up rooms in sinister Leppard Street, where he experiences the inversion of society as he has known it so far. When he finds Lily, his mother, sister and friends heavily oppose their marriage, which is eventually called off as Lily turns out to be cheating him. This final volume is somehow a turndown: Michael, with his quixotic nature, is overtly naive, the picture of the 'underworld' too stereotypical. And why, o why, is Michael's only remedy for his heartbreak the contemplation of priesthood?
June 2, 2021
Beautifully written, very little sense of storytelling, it's just one thing after another. The characters are all vile: entitled upper class idiots with no self-awareness but enough education to pretend not to be as stupid as they actually are. As a glimpse of life at Magdalen in the early years of the 20th century it made me glad I wasn't there then. If I had been, I would have gladly shot all the characters.
October 21, 2024
Very detailed book following Michael Fane from his earliest consciousness ( looking at bars of his cot, so probably aged about 3) to his mid twenties
All told from Michael’s viewpoint
Very little happens in this book ( actually published as 2 novels in 1913 and 1914)
Very long descriptions of Michael’s feelings and thoughts
I didn’t like the character of Michael and had very little interest in his view of his life which was the main reason I didn’t enjoy this book
All told from Michael’s viewpoint
Very little happens in this book ( actually published as 2 novels in 1913 and 1914)
Very long descriptions of Michael’s feelings and thoughts
I didn’t like the character of Michael and had very little interest in his view of his life which was the main reason I didn’t enjoy this book
April 13, 2025
Eight hundred pages, of which the plot could be summarized as: Boy grows up, boy meets girl, boy is told girl is socially beneath him and is a bad choice, girl unintentionally confirms this assessment, boy forgets girl, boy goes to university, boy randomly hears that girl is a prostitute, boy decides he must marry girl, boy leaves girl alone, girl continues to be a prostitute, boy learns of it, boy breaks off engagement.
Wait. I’ve probably expanded too much. Let’s try again. Boy grows up, boy has crush on girl, girl is fickle, boy forgets her, boy is told girl is a prostitue, boy decides to marry her, girl is unfaithful, book ends.
The other 750 pages of this novel read more like the memoirs of a privileged member of the aristocratic class in 1900. But they are at least a fascinating 750 pages.
I’m still trying to turn over in my head whether I enjoyed this book. It read surprisingly quick for something that was plotless, and whose main character I am realizing now I never actually liked. But I could get lost in the descriptions of a different time, and as somebody who enjoys historical fiction, and particularly lately the time leading up to the first world war, reading something that is contemporary to that time is fascinating. And, for obvious reasons, far more real than any of the hackneyed attempts at historical fiction in that era I’ve read recently.
Wait. I’ve probably expanded too much. Let’s try again. Boy grows up, boy has crush on girl, girl is fickle, boy forgets her, boy is told girl is a prostitue, boy decides to marry her, girl is unfaithful, book ends.
The other 750 pages of this novel read more like the memoirs of a privileged member of the aristocratic class in 1900. But they are at least a fascinating 750 pages.
I’m still trying to turn over in my head whether I enjoyed this book. It read surprisingly quick for something that was plotless, and whose main character I am realizing now I never actually liked. But I could get lost in the descriptions of a different time, and as somebody who enjoys historical fiction, and particularly lately the time leading up to the first world war, reading something that is contemporary to that time is fascinating. And, for obvious reasons, far more real than any of the hackneyed attempts at historical fiction in that era I’ve read recently.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 1, 2024
880 pages of small print later, I've finally completed the book. Rather a major accomplishment, wouldn't you say?
January 14, 2021
Not to get too stuck in the vivid portrayals of life at Oxford, I must say that I enjoyed tasting life at Oxford. As in reading Volume One, this awesome author's again reminded me of Edith Wharton, describing Oxford as “the quintessence of human desire and human vision so supremely displayed through the merely outward glory of its repository” and creating delicious word pictures such as these:
• The choir boys gathered like twittering birds at the base of the tower…
• The dons came hurrying like great black birds in the gathering light
• …the choir boys twittered again like sparrows, and, bowing their greetings to one another, the dons cawed gravely like rooks.
When Michael finally graduates from Oxford's oozing snobbery, he embarks into a journey of replicating Don Quixote, one of his all-time favorite characters. Michael's life then becomes a long litany of seeking one “windmill” after another, which I found both hilarious and pathetic at the same time. His compassion was so over-the-top that I actually felt relieved to get the the end of the story and quixotic vanity. At the tender age of twenty-three, this young man catches onto how dangerous it can be to play God.
Holden Caulfield came to mind frequently while I read Volume Two (as he had when I was reading Volume One). I truly wonder if Salinger had read "Sinister Street" before writing "Catcher in the Rye." According to the tuning fork I am holding here, all three volumes seem to converge (and resonate!) on the same note.
• The choir boys gathered like twittering birds at the base of the tower…
• The dons came hurrying like great black birds in the gathering light
• …the choir boys twittered again like sparrows, and, bowing their greetings to one another, the dons cawed gravely like rooks.
When Michael finally graduates from Oxford's oozing snobbery, he embarks into a journey of replicating Don Quixote, one of his all-time favorite characters. Michael's life then becomes a long litany of seeking one “windmill” after another, which I found both hilarious and pathetic at the same time. His compassion was so over-the-top that I actually felt relieved to get the the end of the story and quixotic vanity. At the tender age of twenty-three, this young man catches onto how dangerous it can be to play God.
Holden Caulfield came to mind frequently while I read Volume Two (as he had when I was reading Volume One). I truly wonder if Salinger had read "Sinister Street" before writing "Catcher in the Rye." According to the tuning fork I am holding here, all three volumes seem to converge (and resonate!) on the same note.
May 22, 2013
A well-written and languorously evocative bildungsroman of a turn-of-the-century Englishman of private means. Compton Mackenzie was one of Waugh's favorite authors, which initially inspired me to pick up this book, which sat on my shelves in various stages of completion for over three years. The book's main problem must be its length--I think if I had read it as originally published (2 vol), with some time between them, it might not have seemed so tiring. Still, I am going to give the author's "The Altar Steps" a try, which must mean that I found some redeeming qualities here.
Read
October 7, 2015I should have seen the ending a mile way, but didn't. Typical Brit preoccupations with legitimacy, class structure, etc. MacKenzie was a good writer.
March 6, 2017
After reading MacKenzie's Sylvia Scarlett, I decided to give this book another try. Glad I did. Vol. 2 was much more entertaining. I look forward to more in the series.
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