I’ve been readin God is an Englishman, by R. Delderfield, and having a reaction that can best be summarized as “I like it but…” I think I’d like it better if I’d never read Middlemarch, and possibly also if I’d read it in the early 1970s, when it was new. The problem for me is that it’s of its time, which is neither my time nor the time of its own story. It’s set in the late 1850s/early 1860s, but doesn’t have the voice of that time, like Middlemarch, or a god approximation thereof, like Patrick O’Brian’s work. (Actually, Middlemarch is set in 1830, but if there’s a difference in culture between its 1860s publication and the time of its setting, it’s not visible to me at this distance. Given the turbulence of the 1840s, the Corn Laws and such, there probably are changes that I’m just not seeing.) One problem for me with this book is that because the voice and diction of the book feel like 1970 even when the characters are thinking like people of the 1850s, when the characters go against the conventions of the time, as with women professionals or an interrracial marriage, it’s not clear how much of that is the conventions being false pictures of the time, and how much is Delderfield grafting 1970s values onto 1850s people.
These are basically just background niggles in my brain, though; otherwise the book is both fascinating and educational. But I think I might go reread Middlemarch soon.