The Way of All Flesh (Modern Library) (Paperback)

Still, the flaws exist and the potential reader should be warned of their existence. It's difficult to read, certainly, and extremely slow to get going. The story of the hero's ancestry undoubtedly adds depth to the book, but it also slows it down considerably so that in the early sections you may lose the will to read on.

This problem is compounded by Butler's style. Though he is much less prolix than most 19th century writers and writes good descriptive passages, the sparsity of dialogue makes the book more monotonous than it could have been, the whole story being told purely through the narrator's words, never those of the actual participants in the story. Having said that, the distance this creates between the reader and many of the characters is no doubt intentional on Butler's part, at least to some degree. It does however make you empathise less with Ernest, at least in the first half of the book.

Ernest's journey from conservatism to liberalism is heavily autobiographical, as are the portraits of his family. This should be borne in mind when looking at the conclusion of the book. Ernest (and Butler) end up alone - in a place where no one else is intellectually. Their positions are not always consistent, but that makes this work all the more truthful, for few of us really are, particularly those like Butler who struggled to reject the whole apparatus of recieved wisdom and think as if for the first time. If Ernest is damaged in the process, and never entirely escapes from the mind-set he was raised in, then he is in good company. Think of the ending of Huck Finn, where Huck returns to his old life. The Way of All Flesh - written contemporaneopusly with Huck Finn - is in many respects and Anglicised, middle-class version of that great book. Butler and Twain both show us the difficulties of breaking away and thinking anew, but crucially they afirm that such breakthroughs are possible, that we too can follow in the footsteps of these characters and interpret the world in a fresh and better way.

The Way of All Flesh will not be enjoyed by everyone. It's particular philosophical concerns will not touch everyone, and may seem irrelevant and outmoded to many; but for those who do connect with the book the experience will be infinetely rewarding. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough.

Up until then the book is great. The hero is Ernest Pontifex, but Butler begins *three* generations (along the male line) before Ernest, spending considerably more time on each succeeding generation. This works wonders. For one thing, it enables us to feel alternate loathing *and* sympathy for the book's ogre, Theodore Pontifex - often simultaneous loathing and sympathy. Every single generation shows a kind of promise which is nipped in the bud, in a different way each time. Also we get a good feeling that the story is the story of the nineteenth century as a whole.

Once Ernest is born the author begins to slow down, dawdle, digress and meander, never in a boring way, until a several perfectly believable crisis points follow each other in rapid succession, after which ...

... after which Eliza Savage dies, or something of the kind happens, and the book collapses. It's a pity. I was certain Butler was on to something great, but he doesn't really know how to end it all. We get the kind of unsatisfactory solution that H.G. Wells, at his laziest, would come up with. Ernest even begins to behave like one of Wells's supermen.

There *had* been one flaw before the collapse. Butler would often make keen observations, and then use them to launch into philosophy. Although Butler was am intelligent man he had all the philosophical ability of a taxi driver, and a taxi driver's willingness to share his thoughts. We can easily forgive him as long as the narrative is still strong and he prefaces the philosophical twaddle with intelligent remarks; but not otherwise.

There's also the feeling that Butler is reigning in his horses at the end, unwilling to get stuck into Christianity and the Anglican Church as they really deserve to be stuck into. We tend to forget how much power these institutions had, and how much they abused it. Once we are reminded, Butler's willingness to allow the abuse to continue is puzzling. (Butler's remarks on Christianity are not nearly as disturbing as his remarks on art. That the official doctrine about the resurrection of Christ is absurd, is old news, and was old even when Butler wrote. The claim that Beethoven and Shakespeare were pretentious humbugs is much more shocking.)

A pity about the ending - the book could have been great. Read it all the same.

The highlight of Ernest's life is when he begins to succeed in business on his own merit - but Butler clearly does not see that. Butler is lauded as a "radical" social critic, but apparently clung to the belief that working as a merchant could bring joy to commoners but not to the "gentle born." Am I mis-reading this text?

I must believe that the book's high critical acclaim comes from its historical position as one of the first novels to present an apparently "fair" or "rational" position of secular humanism. Butler seems to be saying: "If we get free of all this religious nonsense we might have a chance at a little happiness in life." How naive. How reactionary. Worse, how utterly boring.

P.S. I was delighted to see that other Amazon reviewers did not feel compelled to praise this useless historical curiousity.