The Explorer (Dodo Press) [Paperback]

Just finished this book today. Like the previous reviewer I`m a big fan of Maugham, but didn't know what to make this melodrama at first. Unlike her, I don't quiver with fear, outrage and self-righteousness when contemplating the views of others unfortunate enough not to have been born in my time and place.

It was apparently written before 1900 but not published until 1907, so a young Willie at work here. Reads curiously like a playscript in many parts - characters will sometimes in their thoughts describe and set up a scene before the action starts, for example. A LOT of conversation here, too.

Anyway, give this to a modern high school class and you`ll lose your teacher's permit yesterday due to the eponymous hero`s views - based on 15 years experience - on the general sincerity of native Africans when dealing with white men. This shocker takes place about page one and is where the aforementioned reviewer no doubt jumped up on a chair holding her skirts and screaming.

The heroine of this tale is impossibly noble and strong, but yearns for the even more impossibly noble and strong hero to relieve her of the burden. They are both willing to sacrifice years of comfort and health and happiness for a noble end. On his part he risks life itself: Try to imagine hacking your way through malarial jungles, warring on Arab slavers, and fighting off wild beasts in the days before anti-biotics, for example.

He is an Imperialist and a Tory. So is everyone else in the book. Horrors! It`s the 1890`s. Haven`t they heard of Obama?!? He - as our aforementioned friend tells us - is a racist. And since he`s a racist, he wipes out slavery in an area of thousands of square miles and sends several hundred Arab slavers to an unscheduled appointment with Shaitan while he`s about it. Terrible man.

His worst sin, perhaps, is that stiff upper lip. Can't he show his emotions like the brave honest creatures who grace our wonderful world today? Can't he weep on cue for the TV cameras when a bunny wabbit gets hurt?

Alas, no. Things were different once, sad as that may be.

What else? In what seems almost like another book, there is a clever and entertaining couple who might remind you of "Nick and Nora Charles" of Hollywood fame. They even seem to be taking over the story towards the end. A very uneven job Maugham made here.

Anyway, after the original surprise (the earliest Maugham I've read) I continued with pleasure and interest. I say again I think it must have been originally written as a play because no one could talk and act the way hero and heroine do in an otherwise naturalistic novel, but no doubt often did on the London stage in the 1890's.

Three stars 'cause Maugham was learning and experimenting, I guess.

I am a fan of Maugham and I suspect this is his worst book. Written and set at the beginning of the 20th century, the explorer of the title is an anachronism, the sort of blood-and-guts 'pacifier of the natives' who invaded east Africa 20 years earlier in the 1880s. Yet he is the character we have to take seriously as the hero and the center of the heroine's life. A lot is made of the beauty of British suppression of emotion, which was practiced and glorified for many decades, thankfully no longer, and from which Maugham himself, especially given his sexual feelings for men, must have suffered a great deal. The heroine is an annoying cipher whose principle activity is clenching her teeth and not crying. Finally, there are two civilized creatures of leisure who befriend hero and heroine and presage Maugham's later witty couples, but here are only mutually insulting, not amusing. This must have been a bad time in the author's life.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews  2.0 out of 5 stars