The Painted Veil
A woman’s journey of discovery
This is an extraordinary book. Written in the 1920s, at first the language seems dated – and yet the story reaches right through to the present day with its eternal theme of the painful search for the meaning of life. It’s about desire, sex, love, fulfilment, cruelty, death and devotion, all as palpably described as any contemporary novel. And Maugham can certainly write.
Written in 1925, The Painted Veil has daring themes of sex, desire and cruelty
His heroine is Kitty, a shallow, beautiful English girl who suddenly finds herself almost on the shelf and marries Walter, a biologist stationed in Hong Kong. In the whirl of colonial life she begins a passionate affair with Charlie, the British hotshot who’s tipped for the governor’s job. He is everything that Walter is not – great fun, charming, handsome, athletic, irresistibly sexy. But he’s married. When Walter discovers their affair, Kitty truly believes that Charlie will leave his wife and marry her … but of course, it’s not as simple as that. The inscrutable Walter has taken a job in a cholera-struck rural outpost in mainland China and he gives Kitty a terrible choice: she must come with him and risk dying, or he will divorce her, naming Charlie as “the other man”.
What follows is some of the best dialogue you’ll ever read. Tense, economical – yet brilliantly revealing and dramatic. It’s no surprise to find out that Maugham was a successful playwright: the scenes between Kitty and Charlie have the fireworks of Noel Coward, but with the darker, more desperate timbre of Graham Greene.
Maugham then takes us, with Kitty, to a faraway, strange city where she confronts those eternal questions. It’s a journey of self-discovery in incredible circumstances, but one that surely rings true with anyone who has travelled far to find their purpose. And it’s a woman’s story, involving death, pregnancy, self-loathing and desperation. Maugham’s ear is instinctively tuned to the feminine, and the feminist, which makes this novel so unusual. There were moments when I gasped at the turn of events. You can’t believe it’s written by a man, a hundred years ago. But it has stood the test of time.
Other titles in Penguin’s Vintage Deco series celebrating the 1920s include Goodbye to Berlin, The Great Gatsby and Mrs Dalloway.