Found Wanting

There’s nothing quite so melancholy as the feeling you get when you intend to take two little girls swimming and the club that houses the pool turns out to be closed for renovations. Fortunately our two nieces are not quite so little anymore and they took the disappointment in good spirit. It helps also that we took them to see Monsters vs Aliens yesterday, in no fewer than three dimensions – our first time ever wearing the dorky (Fafa’s word) glasses – and everybody had a good time. Non-stop action and a lot of good jokes is a formula that rarely fails.

Tolstoy goes about entertaining the reader in somewhat different ways in Anna Karenin, my latest bit of reading. Actually there’s no shortage of humour, generally in a satirical vein, but a Hollywood audience wouldn’t find much in the way of action, though I think there’s plenty going on.

About three or four years ago I re-read War and Peace, which I first read when I was fourteen or fifteen, and which, along with The Lord of the Rings, was my first big novel. I was surprised on the re-reading to realise how fast-moving it was, not at all the monumental blockbuster I read when younger. Similarly Anna Karenin is turning out to be very a very different novel to the one I read when I was seventeen (I think. Around about then, anyway.) On my first reading I recall my real interest focusing on Levin, and to a lesser extent Oblonsky, figures I could relate to what I had already encountered in War and Peace. Levin seemed a continuation of Pierre, and was easily understood in terms of a surrogate Tolstoy. Oblonsky was a development of Tolstoy’s brilliant rendering of the emptiness of fashionable society, managing to be engaging, amusing and deplorable all at the same time.

What I found difficult to relate to all those years ago was the centre of the novel, the triangle of Anna, Karenin and Vronsky. The problem was that they seemed to me, in their different ways, to be trivial characters, not worth all the sound and fury devoted to them and their obvious flaws. Now I see them very differently. Trivial, yes, as we all are, and deeply flawed, but equally deeply, because of their flaws, human. And what is astonishing about the novel is Tolstoy’s ability to become the characters. As he slides effortlessly into their viewpoints – has a third person narrative ever been used with such flexibility? – he understands their feelings with such pinpoint accuracy that you are convinced this is the way they are and the way they feel. He just knows them, utterly.