The Ambassadors (Classics) [Paperback]

I have never read a Henry James work that I haven't had to restart more than a couple of times before reaching the lightbulb moment of understanding. I was even afraid it would never come in 'The Ambassadors'. James's prose is at its densest and most convoluted here, and demands large amounts of concentration, but once you are 'in', you'll be glad you made the effort. It is a beautiful, comic, ironic, subtley-drawn story of a man's personal crisis in the afternoon of his life, set against the background of one of the most artistic, romantic and complex cities in the world.

Lambert Strether is 'our friend' - an amiable, naive, middle-aged American charged with the retrieval of his 'friend's' - the formidable Mrs Newsome's - son, Chad, from his suspected immoral lifestyle in Paris. Strether's personal, social and economic future all hang on his successfully prying Chad away and bringing him safely back to the family nest, where the family business and a strategic marriage await him. However, all does not go according to plan. Seduced by the charms of Paris and its delightful inhabitants, Strether experiences something of a second youth, throwing himself giddily into the social life of a city that is worlds apart from his conservative, uptight, native home of Woollett. So dazzled is Strether that he allows himself to be pleasantly manipulated and exploited by those around him, whose personal interests are in direct opposition to his own. Poor Strether is always several paces behind, and doesn't seem to know what's good for him, but this makes him all the more loveable.

James' linguistic style is at its most extravagant here - every utterance, glance, movement, or silence, is dissected, analysed, and contrasted ad nauseam. The characters are largely self-engrossed, indolent creatures, who spend their time speaking in allusions and metaphor while they praise people for being 'wonderful', 'good' and 'free', and criticize those who don't seem to appreciate the virtues of their decadent lifestyles. James has a fine old time poking fun at all parties involved, including, I suspect, himself. He paints Parisian society as enticing and splendid, yet ultimately deceptive and disillusioning. It brings about Strether's ruin, but we doubt he'd have chosen it any other way.

Henry James is not to everyone's taste, and I suspect that The Ambassadors is the most challenging of his novels. Essentially, it is largely some waffle about rather pretentious, unsympathetic people who do nothing in particular, expressed in tortuous (and sometimes torturous) prose. But there is something about that which is brilliant in itself.

I'll be honest: this book does not "flow". Many years ago I read James' short stories, "The Portrait of a Lady" and "The Wings of the Dove", and carried with me the memory of a fabulous word-smith with a knack for making the inconceivable gradually become the inevitable. I was fascinated by his sardonic and non-judgemental insight into human behaviour as shaped by the stony rules of society. These qualities are still present in "The Ambassadors" but their immediate impact is nearly submerged in a narrative style so full of incidental and parenthetic sentences that I had to read each paragraph several times to fully comprehend it. As James excelled at social satire, I am tempted to conclude that this late work (which he apparently declared to be his best) is in fact a huge joke to see just how much he could get away with in over-bloated prose before any of his admirers called his bluff.

Back to the novel: the premise is that a wealthy young American, who has been living in splendid idleness in Paris, must now return to his provincial home town to assume control of the family business. Strether, who is engaged to the young man's widowed mother, is dispatched with strict instructions to detach Chad from the unsuitable French lady he is suspected of being entangled with, and to bring him back to face his responsibilities, upon penalty of losing a fortune.

Character development is interesting but superficial. Most of the characters are pretentious stereotypes and, on closer acquaintance, hold no surprises and, since morals and socially correct behaviour have changed so much, it requires a huge amount of imagination to understand the motivation that moved these people to act the way they did. Consequently I did not develop any great interest in their doings or their fate. The story meanders aimlessly for far too long without any redeeming twists and, as a final slap of the glove on the face of the hapless reader, James has the perverseness to let it fizzle out into a really disappointing end after building up what little suspense there was towards a very logical and satisfactory conclusion, which he utterly rejects. Thus any emotional involvement the reader struggled to conjure up for such shallow, vapid characters ends up being completely wasted, just as the narrator seems bent on wasting every last chance he gets to improve his life.

For those who read James with expectations of a Eureka moment, I did actually have one. It came very late in the narrative, when Strether boards a train to the countryside in pursuit of the ambiance suggested to him by a little Lambinet painting which he was too poor to acquire. Suddenly a flood of sunshine breaks through the dull, airless atmosphere of the previous 400 plus pages and I forgave Henry James for putting me through all that work. Unfortunately, I cannot be sure that skipping to that bit, without the build-up that precedes it, is going to be at all satisfactory, but one can always try it. Clearly there are people who enjoyed this book, but I cannot think of anyone I know who would bother to make the effort.

Buttoned-up, late-middle-aged Strether, from Boston, is sent to Paris to 'rescue' a friend's wayward son, Chad, from his allegedly dissolute lifestyle. However on the way he begins a sort of romance of his own, finds Paris liberating and discovers Chad and his girlfriend to be charming and cultured. Torn in his loyalties, he cannot act decisively, even when more Bostonians are sent out after him. This great comedy of manners was somewhat weakened for me by the sheer amount of painfully-unsure interiority, with Strether's continual revisions and worries expressed in vast, multiple-claused, self-correcting sentences. I'd quote one except it'd take up more space than this whole review. There is also less 'action' than we're used to nowadays, and by page 400 or so I was flagging. All the characters are so sensitive and circumspect that they keep referring to each other as 'our friend' and 'the person we know' which makes it even harder to follow. The most dramatic scenes happen off-stage, and despite their artiness, the characters never talk about anything except each other. I'm glad to have read it, and sometimes, when I was feeling at peak mental fitness, I even enjoyed it in an exhilarating, mountaineering way, but I think I've earned a Jackie Collins now... :-)