‘The Golden Bowl’ by Henry James

I have never before read a Henry James novel, which I really should have done now that I am in my sixtieth year. I gave this one a go because it was chosen by an online book group I am considering joining and I am glad I did, even though I can not in all honesty say that it was a hugely enjoyable reading experience.

This was published in 1904 and subsequently in a slightly revised version in 1909. Plenty of essays and two volumes of autobiography were to follow, but this was the last full novel that Henry James published.

The premise is most interesting, the story being concerned with two intimate friends who are very attracted towards one another, but who have limited money and thus need to marry other people. One is an Italian Prince called Amerigo, the other a bright young American woman called Charlotte. Both live in London. The clever idea that Henry James had was to create a situation whereby they marry, respectively, a father and daughter (also Americans living in London). The story proceeds from there, but it is very slow moving and not that much ever really happens beyond it becoming established that the situation is impossible and very hard to resolve. So having had a great spanking idea for a plot, Henry James didn’t do so much with it. Nor, if I’m honest, did I find any of the characters to be especially well-drawn. One has plenty of sympathy for Maggie Verver, the daughter who marries Amerigo. But I did not really find myself being hugely emotionally engaged.

The book is long at nearly six hundred pages, and so without a compelling plot or characters, what we are left with really is Henry James’s elegant and very beautiful prose. This is wonderful, of course, particularly the dialogue, but he is very long-winded indeed and this makes it a bit of a struggle for a twenty-first century person looking for a novel to read purely for pleasure.

The book’s title comes from Ecclesiastes 12:6:

Or ever the silver cord be loosed,

or the golden bowl be broken,

or the pitcher be broken at the fountain,

or the wheel broken at the cistern.

A real golden bowl features in the novel. It is made of glass and covered with a gold gilt which masks a hairline crack. I found this to be perhaps rather a clumsy metaphor in all honesty, but the role the bowl plays in the story is quite clever.

Overall it was worth reading, not least because it so often features on lists of great twentieth century novels and because it apparently influenced important, later modernist writers. Its setting is quite reminiscent of Victorian high society novels, but the in depth focus on the thoughts, feelings and actions of a small number of characters has a more twentieth century feel. It is also a deeply serious book. No thrills and spills. No humour. Quite intense. But very well-written.