Most books, if you choose carefully, are worth your time to read, enjoy and inevitably forget. Most books are digestible, and serve that purpose. The good books alter you — they can make you more cynical, more wary of your friends, angrier. Good books can poison you. Some can make you kinder.
I went past an Indian beggar below a crossing this week and gave her money without much thought, a type of charity that I haven’t done for a long time. I cannot think why, save for the fact that I was reading The Mill on the Floss. I sympathise with the struggle of Maggie Tulliver to follow Christian doctrines or to follow her impulses. I struggle for years with the idea of giving and taking. The book in many ways, became personal to me.
My favourite books have been a character’s inner battle with their principles and actions, whether they succeed or fail. The Mill on the Floss is rich with fully realised characters battling their own struggles — Mr Tulliver who vowed revenge and see to it, Maggie to betray her cousin or not with an easy and more convenient life, or Phillip Wakem who battled his inner demons to enjoy Maggie selfishly or to be her protector regardless of the situation. Phillip especially, hit me hard. Anyone who’s loved somebody unselfishly have gone through his inner struggle, and you can’t help rooting for him.
Needless to say, I love the characters in the book, even though their actions frustrate me at the worst of times. Eliot is a master of exploring these character’s unsaid thoughts, to expose them naked and without judgement, left that duty to the reader. Her language can be long and philosophising. You can hit roadblocks at times, as there are sentences that might take you three or four reads before you grasp it, and even then only just. But this struggle is worthwhile, it will force you to think of your own circumstances.
I woke up this morning and felt an immense sadness for Maggie Tulliver, that her inner victory to reject the easy temptation still is a defeat from the eyes of society, that her defeat of circumstances overshadowed her triumph of principles. Some of my favourite characters in literature had to overcome this same challenge, and failed — Lily Barth, Countess Olenska, Anna Karenina. But that sadness is what forces you to be kind.
