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35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Compelling., 21 Sep 2003
It doesn't start off very promisingly. Kitty is having an illicit afternoon liaison with her lover, Charles Townshend, and it's all so very British Empire. Talk of tiffin and men in topi's can make it feel like "Carry On Up The Khyber", albeit set in China instead of India! But after that first short chapter you quickly get drawn into it. Kitty, in spite of her faults, is a very likeable and only-too-human heroine, and her husband, Walter Fane, is one of the most intense and complex characters Maugham ever wrote. Fane takes a disturbingly bizarre revenge on his wife's infidelity by making her accompany him to a cholera-ridden village in the wilds of China. Once there, Kitty seeks spiritual salvation and insight, and succeeds. Sadly, there is to be no happy ever after for this couple, and I was genually saddened that this was so. But Maugham, with his usual sharp insight, gives us great insight into the bit players in Kitty's life, such as Waddington and his mysterious Chinese princess, and the Mother Superior at the convent. This is good stuff.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly Reccomended, 6 Sep 2007
This a book that became one of my instant favourites. It tells the story of Kitty, the beautiful though superficial wife of socially inept doctor Walter Fane. Bored of life in Hong Kong she begins and affair with Charles Townsend whom she finds eminently more suitable. Ultimately her deception uncovered her husband exacts an unusual vengeance making her accompany her to a cholera ridden province in mainland China. Whilst the story line is fascinating in itself the real beauty of the novel comes from the descriptions of the feelings both husband and wife have for each other. Both come of as incredibly human with believable flaws, and though I was slightly disappointed with the ending the rest of the novel continually delighted me.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Vintage Maugham, 18 Jun 2008
The Painted Veil pits amiable but unscrupulous fools against tormented souls, has a duly sarcastic starting-point, and is set in far-away, warlord-era China; in short, it has the ingredients for vintage Maugham.
The book begins in Hong Kong, with an adultery scene. Kitty Fane is beautiful, shallow, and calculating. She soon finds her match in Charles Townsend, a vain and cynical but popular colonial official - and in her own husband, the lover's very photo-negative, who drags her through plague-ridden country in revenge. The story is that of her spiritual transformation. It can even be read to show women's superior ability for moral elevation.
The Painted Veil is full of Maugham's innumerable human insights, and it is filled with danger, physical and psychological. This is an easy to read, absorbing novel. Readers expecting lush visions of warlord-era China to jump from the page, though, will need to look in another place. The "native" country is distant, dream-like and morbid, seen through the eyes of the heroine, whose preoccupations are elsewhere. It is only peered at from the height of a curtained palanquin. Indeed, the novel paints the superficial and self-centred expatriate community of Hong-Kong much more than it does labouring China; as such, it probably remained true to life until very recent times.
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