Mount TBR #60

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq. – William Makepeace Thackeray

It’s strange that I finish the reading year as I began: with a picaresque novel. Barry Lyndon was first published in 1844. It was a dusty forgotten novelette until Stanley Kubrick made a gorgeous movie out of it in the middle 1970s.

Set in the late 18^th century, our young anti-hero, Redmond, must flee his native Ireland after a scandal in which his affection for a cousin nearly derails her brothers’ efforts to marry her off to a detestable but rich Englishman. After misadventures, he enlists as a British squaddie fighting on the Continent. He deserts but is impressed in a mercenary army of the Prussians. Worse, he is forced to become a household sneak and spy, where at least he meets his long-lost uncle who has been unable to return to Ireland because of political troubles. The uncle helps him escape the clammy Prussian grip. The two sharpers make a precarious living at play (gambling) in the shabby minor courts of Europe. Redmond goes to England in order to relentlessly pursue a wealthy widow, Countess Lyndon. He marries her, but his utter irresponsibility with money denies him happiness and respectability.

Compared to exuberant Dickens and genial Trollope, Thackeray’s humor is bitterly satirical but at least unprejudiced. Thackeray aims smacks at everybody. He punctures apologists of English doings in Ireland and the hypocrisy of English society at every level, especially concerning ambitions for gentility. He ridicules Irish poverty and pretentions to royal lineages that reach back into the misty reaches of time. Thackeray even mocks the stock character of the loyal-unto-death Irish Mama. The dragon Bell Brady spoils Redmond rotten and forgives him for his worst misbehaviors and eggs on his low conceits and brutal mistreatment of his wife. Thackeray also derides military valor, prowesss, and honor as words words words.

Besides the untrustworthy unlikable narrator, jumps in time and anti-authoritarian stance, this novel feels modernist for its use of real historical characters and scandals of bygone days:

… it was through Mr. Reynolds that I was introduced to a score of [men of letters], and their great chief, Mr. Johnson. I always thought their great chief a great bear. He drank tea twice or thrice at my house, misbehaving himself most grossly; treating my opinions with no more respect than those of a schoolboy, and telling me to mind my horses and tailors, and not trouble myself about letters. His Scotch bear-leader, Mr. Boswell, was a butt of the first quality. I never saw such a figure as the fellow cut in what he called a Corsican habit, at one of Mrs. Cornely’s balls, at Carlisle House, Soho. But that the stories connected with that same establishment are not the most profitable tales in the world, I could tell tales of scores of queer doings there. All the high and low demireps of the town gathered there, from his Grace of Ancaster down to my countryman, poor Mr. Oliver Goldsmith the poet, and from the Duchess of Kingston down to the Bird of Paradise, or Kitty Fisher. Here I have met very queer characters, who came to queer ends too: poor Hackman, that afterwards was hanged for killing Miss Ray, and (on the sly) his Reverence Doctor Simony, whom my friend Sam Foote, of the ‘Little Theatre,’ bade to live even after forgery and the rope cut short the unlucky parson’s career.

Basically, our narrator is selfish, egotistical, careless, lying, xenophobic, racist and misogynist. He sees the world as a vicious brutal arena where only the nasty and cruel win. Barry believes that everyone owes him respect though he is too lazy to do anything to earn respect.  All the bad things that happen to him occur because people defame him or want revenge for his nonexistent misdeeds. Everything that goes wrong is the fault of others.

Funny that Barry Lyndon reminds me so much of – oh, never mind. It’s Christmas, after all.