Compton Mackenzie (1883–1972)

“Sinister Street”

a bildungsroman by Compton Mackenzie

I read the first hundred pages of this gigantic novel in awe that its sparkling text could have been written over a hundred years ago. Mirroring Joyce's near-contemporary “Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man”, “Sinister Street” goes further, beefing up childhood impressions with deep probes into the psychology of the quixotic child, Michael Fane, as he grows from toddler to man about town. Also, there is great prose, much of show more it landscape, which almost always avoids the purple.

But not the purple cloth. Mackenzie was one of that triumvirate of Roman Catholic convert authors (the others being Graham Green and Evelyn Waugh). I was dismayed with the boy's religious fanaticism dominating the next two hundred pages. Precocious even by Joyce's standards, Michael Fane's curious admixture of faith, bookishness and larks stood him on the Irishman's shoulders, rather, as if at twelve he were already the Victorian equivalent of Compleat Man. Wallowing through all this religiosity, I began to apply the formula of seven deadly virtues to Compton Mackenzie's literary boasts. Deadly because seen from the outside as negative, in Fane's world these virtues are untainted by vice. Snob (as amalgam of pride and prejudice), prig, braggadocio, zealot, hypocrite, smug & glib. From a famous public school in London, to an exclusive college in Oxford then on into the slums of Pimlico, Michael Fane lives according to the above codes in order to retain the title of gentleman. Even punching a copper and spending the night in the Bow Street cells fails to tarnish his self esteem and righteousness.

Pre-dating “Brideshead Revisited” by three decades, “Sinister Street” is said to be the quintessential portrait of undergraduate life at Oxford. From the viewpoint of Michael Fane's snob, almost everyone deserves looking down on: street boys, Rhodes Scholars, peers whose tastes he deplores. Even his taste in girls suffers from an entropy of sneer. Attracted to those who set out to attract, Michael is sooner or later appalled by their contrariness and crashes out of his slumming ways.

The title puzzled me for hundreds and hundreds of pages; presumably it was meant to. The Fane family (Charles Michael Saxby Fane, his semi-pro pianist sister Stella and their unmarried mother) do move about somewhat; so at each of Michael's new locations I paused to think if it were the eponymous street. One thing that does not wander at all is the point of view, which doggedly remains Michael's. This is an achievement, enduring over two hundred thousand words; but his cut-glass world view distorts as well as reveals. Not quite in a sinister way, I should add.

This novel is so long, it becomes writing above fiction. What's more it begs sequels; and the sequence of three it begot (“Plasher's Mead”, “Sylva Scarlett”, “Syvia and Michael”) was only curtailed by The Great War. Other than that, it's a veritable Downton Abbey of industry over craft, a voluminous Victorian handbag of a work. Yet it is not all told. Which probably inspired Orwell to go “Down and Out” on crusading slums of his own; and as in there, we are left by caesuras to guess what peccadilloes dared not speak their names. The novel's popularity (stayed in print for most of the twentieth century) is partly down to the censorship of popular libraries followed by championship by the Daily Mail. Many were the boarding school bums caned for possessing it, but it was never banned outright like DH Lawrence's more explicit work. In truth, the (orignally) two volumes are very long on the results of adultery but rather short on their details.

Having deprecated the hero, I must say the romantic vision of Lily is irresistible, despite her sloth. In Fane's smitten shoes, I would have been tempted to take old Mrs Carthew's advice and “beat her figuratively for a year” lest she became “a shrew or a whiner”. But in the pursuance of his romantic dream, he is incapable of taking good advice, only bad. Whether he marries her is not revealed until very near the end of the book (829 pages in my battered 1969 Penguin paperback). Like with further episodes of Downton, I ponder taking in the sequels - lifetime permitting. show less

This book was on the list Scott Fitzgerald put together for his mistress Sheila Graham to educate her about literature. That could be the reason why people seek it out today, a century after it came out. But I imagine not everyone who picks it up finishes it. Who wants to read more than 1100 pages of the coming of age of a talented, lazy, naive restless youth as he matures oh so slowly? The prose is ornate and latinate, overripe for current taste. The plot seems formless until many of the show more strands are woven together in the last quarter of the book (Book IV). But there are delights for those who persist. The book opens with a successful depiction of an infant’s point-of-view (notoriously difficult to pull off). Book III contains a loving description of the indolent life of the privileged at Oxford, which somehow yields something like an education. There are good set pieces, as when the protagonist reads Keats on St Mark’s Eve in his Oxford room and deliberates on the attempt to freeze time by aesthetic expression or when he challenges two of his classmates who become priests on the mission of the church. There are some insights that by themselves are worth the price of admission, as when the protagonist’s sister Stella, training to become a concert pianist, tells him “I don’t think I’ve got a soul, because when I play I go rushing out into the darkness to look for my soul, and the better I play the nearer I get.” Most of all, I enjoyed the homage to other works of literature. The protagonist, Michael Fane, is a reincarnated Don Quixote, plopped into London at the cusp of the 20th century; other points of reference include Dante and Manon Lescaut. The two volumes have been sitting patiently on my shelf since I purchased them in pre-Internet days in a used bookstore in London, and I’m glad I finally took the time to savor them. A good read. show less

An amusing tale of involuntarily abstemious Scottish island life during WWII, with unforgettable characters and a lot of rollicking fun.

Basically a series of "Yes, Minister" between two covers, somehow, which was quite an unexpected delight. Quite a funny romp through the British civil service in the postwar period.