Over a hundred and fifty pages into George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
I used to be a regular reader of the 19th century novel – Wilkie Collins, Hardy, even Trollope, though the only George Eliot I’d previously read was Silas Marner. I guess practice brought an amplified patience level.
Reading Middlemarch isn’t like reading more modern novels. The end is not in sight. I’m in the middle of a behemoth, stretching out on either side of me; I’m standing on an endless curve watching time and page space unfold around me. But unlike more current epic novels there is no attempt made for excitement or suspense to carry me along. Five or six pages go by where characters discuss business or local politics and from a twenty-first century perspective it just feels like so much filler.
Of course, if you’re in the mood . . . if you just moved and your life feels excessively chaotic and unsettled, something as static and harmless as a Victorian novel might just hit the spot. You open the book and enter a world where nothing’s changed and little will change. If anything does happen in the plot it will probably be encased in a hundred pages of gentle prose and slow cushioning, lest the change feel too sudden. It’s like evolution, continental drift: you won’t see the changes in your lifetime.
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