Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb!, 11 Nov 2002
Somerset Maugham never fails to impress me with his aptitidude for observation. All the while you think him a "discreet" character, he's secretly building up a profile of you, only to reveal it at a later time. He's like a master spy, a dangerous friend, an absolute loner, a friendly but cold englishman. His reverence to whats going on around him is impeccable always. If theres one man you can trust it's W. Somerset Maugham. You can't 'not' love the guys stance, it's wonderful.
Cakes and Ale is a wonderful, hefty read. I truly enjoyed sitting round my fireplace, smoking and enjoying a glass of wine with this one. Higly recommend it.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Literarily if not dietically nutritious and liable to make you Belch, 15 Sep 2008
Here we have a real author (Somerset Maugham) creating a first-person narrator (William Ashenden), who is also a novelist (fictional, of course) and acquainted with another (more successful) writer, Alroy Kear. They disagree over the legacy of the now famous (but still fictional) Edward Driffield: Ashenden thinks "his novels rather boring" while Kear goes along with the consensus which acclaims Driffield "as the greatest novelist of our day". Such literary debate and layering of representations might seem unpromising material to all but those researching a thesis on metanarrative, but don't be put off: this is an engaging novel in which satire and intellect are leavened with humour and warmth and moments of surprising intimacy.
When Ashenden first met Driffield, it wasn't his writing that made an impression but the fact that he taught the young William to ride a bicycle. Integral with the physical thrill of wheeled motion was the knowledge he was disobeying his uncle and betraying his class. Growing up in his uncle's household, a vicarage, at a time in late Victorian society when vicars enjoyed high social standing, he is steeped in the attitudes of his class ("I couldn't possibly have anything to do with" children who go to the grammar school). He shouldn't have been associating with Driffield and his wife (Rosie, an ex-barmaid!) and should have been afraid of the consequences, of falling off, of being punished by his uncle, of being ostracized by his class, but, instead, by the end of the lesson, "I was laughing so much that I positively forgot all about my social status." Try as he might, it "was very hard under such circumstances to preserve the standoffishness befitting the vicar's nephew with the son of Miss Wolfe's bailiff."
Although the adolescent William does not know it and would have been horrified to have learned it, he has more in common with the Driffields than with his own family. It is not so much that he would move to London and move in the same circles as them, or that he would eventually become a writer himself. It is more about an attitude to life expressed many years later by Rosie: "Why not be happy with what you can get? Enjoy yourself while you have the chance, I say; we shall all be dead in a hundred years, and what will anything matter then? Let's have a good time while we can." Today we are often indignant at high-street hedonism and at what constitutes a "good time" for other people, but, in the aftermath of World War I, the scale of destruction of young life was a recent and raw fact, and perhaps lends Rosie's view a more serious edge.
The theme of antagonism toward literature - toward telling the truth about life as best we can - is one of the ironic pleasures of reading this novel: if certain people had had their way, we would be denied such pleasures. One reviewer of Edward Driffield's "The Cup of Life" feared it might fall "into the hands of young boys and innocent maidens... The more foolish demanded that the book should be suppressed and some asked themselves gravely if this was not a case where the public prosecutor might with fitness intervene." Ashenden is as scornful of those who would ban Driffield's book (the only one he "should like to have written") as Somerset Maugham must have been of those who wanted to ban his own "Cakes and Ale". At one point Ashenden recalls his uncle's disapproval of a novel by Mrs Humphrey Ward, which "would unsettle people's opinions and give them all sorts of ideas that they were much better off without."
We never find out what was so provoking to the vicar, but we have a pretty good idea what it was about "Cakes and Ale" that the Malvolios of Somerset Maugham's day took such exception to. Toward the end of the novel, Ashenden defends Rosie in terms that even today might raise an eyebrow. "She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not a vice". Earlier, we learn that hers "was a body made for the act of love". Perhaps it was this kind of honesty, together with titillating phrases such as "hard nipples", which enraged the would-be censors? As twenty-first-century readers, we have to make some allowance for the stiff language of the era (perhaps only a character in a romance would now think of themselves as engaging in an "act of love"), but there is nothing in the book that would qualify for a bad-writing-about-sex award.
Ashenden is approaching old age and he tells his story with wry humour rather than bitterness. As a writer he admits that "as we grow older we feel ourselves less and less like God". As a man he recognizes that "from the earlier times the old have rubbed it in to the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young discovered what nonsense this was they were old too". Every reader of fiction must sometimes have wondered whether it's healthy to be so occupied "with the trivial concerns of imaginary people". Somerset Maugham, through his narrator Ashenden, gives us a wonderful reason why we are not wasting our time with novels: "if the proper study of mankind is man it is evidently more sensible to occupy yourself with the coherent, substantial, and significant creatures of fiction than with the irrational and shadowy figures of real life."
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Literary Life in the '20s, 5 May 2008
This book is set partly in London and partly in North Kent - especially Blackstable (Whitstable), Tercanbury (Canterbury) and Ferne Bay (Herne Bay), and takes place mostly in the 1920s but with long flashbacks to the 1890s. Fundamentally it's a satire on the literary world. There is a biographer (Alroy Kear) who makes himself lovable in order to get on, a critic whose speech is full of classical allusions, various literary ladies - and Edward Driffield, a class-blind novelist whose marriage to an `unsuitable' former barmaid (Rosie) is disapproved of by all the snobbish literati who otherwise rave about his descriptions of `the common people'. The narrator (William Ashenden) also a novelist, is pretty waspish himself, and there are lengthy stonehearted asides on literary fashions, the use of the first person, the concept of beauty and especially the social protocols necessary to get well-known. The plot concerns the attempts by Kear and Driffield's second wife, who are arranging a biography of the now-deceased Grand Old Man, to get Ashenden to reveal what he knows of Driffield's life. The main scandal is not only that he married a barmaid, but that she was regularly unfaithful to him, including with Ashenden himself. In terms of social comment, it's well out-of-date, but to my mind it's still very readable and quite funny. And it certainly made me pleased to be living now rather than back in the bad old days...
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