While Sir Edgar is away, young and rich, but thorougly disreputable Rowley Flint proposes to her too. She rejects him indignantly: this young man has already divorced several wives, and wherever he goes, scandal follows him. Marrying him would be madness; she is now more determined than ever to marry Sir Edgar and as soon as possible. But on her way back home she meets a desperately poor Austrian refugee…

She decides to do this poor guy a kindness. It starts with taking him to her home and giving him food to eat; then they walk in the garden… and then, in a moment of the utmost excitement, unable to control herself, Mary decides to make poor Karl even happier. She gives him the most precious gift – herself.

At first all is well, and Karl is indeed very happy, but as the morning approaches, the fairy tale has to end, and she blurts out the truth to him: it’s not love but pity that made her do what she did. Hurt and humiliated, Karl at first tries to murder her, and when that fails, shoots himself with the revolver Mary takes out of her bag. Sir Edgar’s revolver.

The scandal that is now awaiting Mary is horrible to imagine. And she has no-one but Rowley to call for help.

That night she rediscovers Rowley. Cynical and disreputable as he is, he shares the risks with her, though he doesn’t have to, and helps her dispose of the body. He keeps his head when she can’t and pulls her out of the most unpleasant situation. Of course, in taking Karl’s body away and hiding it in the woods they commit an offence, but the scandal is averted. Mary can carry on further with her plans. If only she had taken Rowley’s advice not to tell anything to Sir Edgar!

But being naturally honest she tells him everything. Sir Edgar is a noble person; he forgives her – or says so – but now marrying her would mean he will have to ruin his career: becoming a Governor now would mean living in a constant fear that the scandal will surface. Mary, who has ruined one life already, can’t ruin another. She refuses to marry Sir Edgar. He goes away, outwardly indignant – but deep in his heart, she knows it, very much relieved. And she has nothing to do now but to marry Rowley, which no longer seems as bad an idea as it seemed a day ago.

After all, who is she to judge him? Not a woman of an impeccable reputation as she thought, but a huge sinner and, in her own words, a fool. She looks differently at herself now – and at Rowley also. Even though she doubts very much that he will ever be able to be faithful to her, she is prepared to take that risk.

Once again, Somerset Maugham proves his immensely deep knowledge of human psychology, instinctively knowing how all his characters will act in these very uncommon circumstances. Of course, if Mary hadn’t given Karl a lift that night, she would have married Sir Edgar, and her life would have been very common; there would have been no excuse to write a book about her, though. Would she have been happier? Hard to say, but I don’t think so. With Rowley she will never be bored, and if there’s ever any danger, he is going to be pretty capable of pulling himself and Mary out of it; he has proven it. He will probably even settle finally, though such men seldom settle until they get really old. It’s up to the reader to decide what is going to happen to all these people now.

It’s not Mary I feel sorry for – it’s Karl. And Sir Edgar, too, but mainly Karl. A young life cut short for nothing – but, after all, there were so many of them, victims of the Nazis. In the years to come there would be millions (judging by the known historical dates, the events in the book must have happened between the end of 1938 and the beginning of 1939, though the book itself was first published in 1953). Karl had little hope anyway – he might have died from starvation, or in the war. At least, Mary made him happy for a few short hours. And Rowley was right about this boy – he was unstable.

The book is quite short – just 94 pages – but it makes me think about so many things! I’ve read 400+-page novels that don’t come even close to this book in depth and literary value. I recommend it to everyone. You’ll find the language beautiful too – it’s easy to read, but it sings.

It’s a library book, and I know I’ll be sorry to part with it when the time comes to return it.

Alice, a promising violinist and just a beautiful young woman, must be the most shocking of them all, since, when we meet with her for the first time, she is cold-bloodedly contemplating leaving her child – her two-month-old daughter – forever and running away from her kind and responsible husband, just so she could become a concert violinist one day. Soon she meets Tom, a talented flautist, for whom a road accident became the end of his career, not so much due to the damage to his body as due to his mental injury. The accident made Tom a difficult, easily annoyed person. He abandoned his college and started playing in the tube. Alice joins his band for a short while. Together with them, we can see a gay couple – Peter and Jay – and some other individuals who come and go.

The plot of the book revolves around the London’s tube and around the old house called Cambridge School or just “the School”. It’s no longer a school though, but just a house in extremely bad repair where the owner – Jarvis Stringer – lets rooms as an extremely cheap rate, just so he could afford travelling around the world examining metro systems, which are his one and only hobby, the only passion of his life. Considered slightly crazy by many, Jarvis is in fact one of the most normal persons in the book, and his hobby is quite harmless. Most of the time we just hear about him, since he is in the USSR, studying our metro systems – lucky man, in fact, since 1991 was the last year of the USSR’s existence, and if he had postponed his trip just a little, he might have had fifteen visas instead of one. But I digress. Jarvis is writing a book about the history of the London Undeground, and “King Solomon’s Carpet” is full of quotations from his book. I must admit I skipped most of them this time.

Among the people who occupy his large house we meet his distant cousin Tina and her two kids, Jasper and Bienvida. Tina is very promiscuous – and proudly so, to the great distress of her mother Cecilia, old enough to be her grandmother and struggling to reconcile her old, almost Victorian morals with the standards of the new world. Cecilia lives in her own house nearby. Her life-time friend Daphne – Peter’s mother – is equaly distressed with her son’s “silliness” – her name for his homosexuality. Peter suffers from AIDS, and by the end of the book his health deteriorates to such a condition that we know his days are numbered, though it is not explicitly stated.

Alice’s love for Tom doesn’t last long – she meets Axel. Axel is all mystery, walking around the tube with an ugly, sinister man named Ivan, usually dressed up like a bear, embarrassing and even scaring some people who, like Cecilia, see no fun in it. We know Axel is up to something, but what it is we won’t know until the end of the book.

A lot of time is given to describing Jasper’s adventures. Tina’s nine-year-old son, usually neglected by his mother, truant and rebellious, travels a lot by the tube accompanied by a few other boys of the same age. Guilty of smoking, shop-lifting and endless fights in the train cars, these boys make enemies at every turn, but the worst of their entertainments is the so-called “sledging” – riding on the top of the train. Jasper has done it many times and enjoyed it intensely – mainly, I think, the danger of it – until his friend falls from the roof of the car he is in when the train stops abruptly. When Jasper sees his friend fall and realises what it means, it changes him.

I don’t know why, but I can’t help liking them all – Alice, Tom, Tina, Jasper and even Axel, who is contemplating a really dreadful thing. He scares Jasper, pretends to be Jarvis’s friend in his absense to squat in his house, seduces Alice while pretending to be friends with Tom – and these all are steps towards his ultimate goal: revenge. It was his twin sister who died in the underground train from a heart failure when she entered it for the first time in her life, a spoilt child of a wealthy family. She did so to satisfy her curiosity and didn’t think of possible consequences, didn’t know what was awaiting her there during the rush hour. But her brother decided to blame the tube. “I am mad”, he said once about himself. I think he was right.

By the end of the book they all get punished, except, probably, Tina, who inherits a nice villa after her mother’s death. Now she can meet all her boyfriends in more comfortable environments and not worry about anything. She is even planning to let some rooms, like Jarvis does. She’ll be alright, this easy-going, untroubled pretty creature. Axel, Alice and Tom are much less lucky, though they all have nobody but themselves to blame.

My special admiration goes for Jed, the hawk-keeper whose chothes stink of stale meat repelling people from him and his room. When told by a vet that his hawk will never be able to fly again due to an infection disabling his wing, he at first decides to euthanise the bird – an obvious thing to do, under the circumstances – but then decides to keep the hawk alive, not for the sake of training it, but just for the sake of being together, of living under the same roof. By sparing the bird’s life, by being able to value it he won my undying respect.

Though Ruth Rendell is mainly known as a detective novel writer, this book is not a detective story at all. It’s a huge psychological study, deep and somewhat disturbing, when we can’t help wondering if normalcy still exists in our world. Why do people do such things to themselves and their lives? She doesn’t give us any answers to the question – just makes us think.

The book definitely does deserve the Gold Dagger Award it got in 1991.

I’ve re-read the book to review it – and now I’m finding out that I no longer blame Kitty for anything. Probably because I’m older, I no longer judge her – I’ve grown to understand, to see things from her point of view. She couldn’t bring herself to love Walter for his virtues; well, if she couldn’t, she couldn’t. She’s never had proper guidance, and she was alone in Hong Kong, alone save for her husband, whose presence was a trial to her. No wonder that mature and experienced woman-hunter Charlie Townsend found it so easy to get hold of her.

I’ve accepted the fact that Kitty is not me. I’ve even learned to admire her for what she is – but oh! I still feel so sorry for Walter! It still feels so unfair that such a wonderful man should die so young – die from “broken heart”, in Kitty’s words.

I’m glad that she – though way too late – learned to appreciate him, if not love him. But the most fascinating part of the book to me – just like the first time – is still the story of Kitty’s experiences in the French convent in Mei-tan-fu, a cholera-stricken Chinese town where she finds herself, a victim of Charlie’s treachery and Walter’s bitterness. The nuns show her the new way – their faith and self-sacrifice of the kind she’d never encountered before open for her new horizons. She reforms under their influence – she becomes a new woman, a person with new, more refined, higher values. Too bad Walter was too proud to forgive her; I’m sure they could have been happy – through newly acquired mutual respect, which has been known to grow into love, a different, more mature sort of love… but the author decides otherwise. Walter has to die; Kitty has to rediscover herself more than once yet (and some of those discoveries are quite unpleasant to her), but she finds her peace of mind, after all. She is pregnant – and full of expectations for the new life. I can only wish her well.

It was pleasant for me to follow Kitty’s reformation, especially when she grew from regarding Chinese children as ugly and repulsive to feeling affectionate towards them. It proves that prejudices forced upon us during our early life through social stereotypes are never too late to overcome. It gives me hope…

Would I have offered those nuns my help if I had ever been put in Kitty’s situation? I don’t know. Maybe; and maybe not. But the book has definitely opened new horizons to me, like the nuns did to Kitty. It’s given me new ideas about life; new ideas of how one could be tolerant of others’ imperfections and of how one could find joy in sacrifice. The Mother Superior at the convent seems almost a saint – she is, as we now say, a perfect role model, except that few of us are strong enough to follow that amazing example. But if we can’t follow it, it still should help to think about it from time to time.

It did make my day to re-read the book, at any rate, and I definitely do recommend it. You’ll find it beautifully written, too – and, despite the certain grimness of the background, refreshing. Somerset Maugham was, I believe, a genius; he definitely knew human nature more than most writers do – and he loved people, despite knowing them so well. A rare gift.

Was that nice, witty and cynical Mr Waddington (with whom I’m almost in love) in a way Somerset Maugham’s avatar? I wonder…

The trouble with Holden is, though, he is too good at getting himself into a mess and at turning people against himself. He is supposed to behave childishly, but in fact he behaves too much like an adult, but a stupid adult. He quarrels with people, so he has to leave a hotel too soon and continue wandering without a place to go. He believes himself to be old enough to drink, though he is already foolish enough when he is sober. And he keeps telling us about his adventures.

I think Holden is supposed to sound stupid too, but he doesn’t. He does stupid things, but he sounds like an intelligent person, but one with a certain mental disorder, which makes him act the way he does. His main emotions are dislike and depression. He dislikes people, places, music, shows – everything he encounters, except, perhaps, his little sister Phoebe, a lovely, intelligent girl of ten. He keeps saying, “it’s depressing” about nearly everything.

And he also gives an impression of a very vulnerable person. We know he’s going to get himself into a mess long before he actually does. It’s like he is not going to make it to the end of the book alive.

The book is written in a completely unique writing style. I wouldn’t even call it a “writing” style at all, because books are not generally written this way. Teenagers talk in this manner to one another, that’s true – not the uneducated teenagers, but those who have got an education, but feel shy about it. It’s not exactly ungrammatical, but gives an impression of being ungrammatical, and it’s full of jargon and swearing.

If not for a few funny episodes, I would have probably put the book aside half-way through it. I’m not a depressed teenager, after all, so why should I bother? But I’ve finished it. Perhaps, I was just curious what would happen to this fool Holden on the next page. But when he was about to make the stupidest things of all and ruin his life altogether – just because he felt like it – his smart little sister saved him from it. A guy who thought himself old enough to drink and to invite a prostitute to his room needed help from a child to keep himself from a ruin.

I think teenagers like the book and think it “deep”. At 16, many feel like life is not worth it, so they like every book and every movie that talks about teenage depressions. They’ll understand Holden no doubt – but thing is, he takes it too far. I must admit Salinger knows a lot about psychology of young people, but I have to say the book bored me to death nevertheless. Having reviewed it, I’ll now take it back to the library without re-reading it. “Just in no mood for it”, as Holden would say. Or, rather, it’s just not in my line.

These are well known facts. The question is, “why?” Why did Dorian succumb so easily to the poisonous influence of Lord Henry’s words? Was it because he had been deprived of all pleasures during his childhood, growing up in the house of his stern and unloving grandfather? Was it because he was too good-looking for a man? Once I knew a young man who was just a little too good-looking – and he did tend to worship himself a little to much and to be selfish to the point of being immoral. Or was it just because this depravity was part of his real nature, just sleeping inside him until the day when it was destined to be woken – if not by Lord Henry, then by someone else. There’s always an eloquent cynic around, ready to prey on the innocent. Most of us can resist them – if we wish. Dorian didn’t even try to resist.

The result was horrible. Just like Dr Jekyll, Dorian was bound to discover that impunity didn’t exist. He ruined many others – he murdered his friend Basil Hallward – and then he finally ruined himself. It was inevitable.

I remember well how this book fell into my hands when I was just starting to read in English. In those days my vocabulary was quite restricted, but it was enough to appreciate the exquisite beauty of Oscar Wilde’s writing style. It wasn’t hard to read at all: I could easily guess the meaning of most unknown words from the context – and it sang to me. I’m re-reading it now, and it still sings to me. When I first read the book, I felt terribly sorry for Dorian whose life had been so promising, but was so thoroughly wasted. I was very angry with Lord Henry and blamed him for everything. I still feel sorry for Dorian – but in a different way, and I no longer blame Lord Henry, for nobody can deprave us if we don’t want to be depraved.

This book is a useful and fascinating read, and I recommend it to everyone – but especially to those who are 20 years old.

Just one amazing point: Dr Jekyll was forgiven all mortal sins, all crimes committed in his second self – even a murder. What he wasn’t forgiven was a momentary vainglorious thought. That was what finally brought the grave punishment upon him. Definitely there is something to think about in this: even the most virtuous of us have, I’m sure, more than once been guilty of this particular sin.

The story of gradual deterioration of his moral sense, under the influence of his transforming draught, is both fascinating and scary. The fate of the unfortunate Henry Jekyll is heartbreaking: you can’t help pitying him, even knowing that he – of all people – had nobody but himself to blame. The apparent impunity of his double existence was not a true one – and the punishment it finally resulted in was far more horrible than anything he could have received under normal circumstances, even including the gallows. The saddest part of all is that he brought about the deaths of two more people but himself – two genuinely good people, Sir Danvers Carew and his own good old friend Dr Hastie Lanyon.

Impunity doesn’t exist: that’s just one of the things the author seems to be driving at. I could think of a few more, but they would all be revolving around this core one. So I’ll stop now and just recommend this book to you, dear reader, if for some reason you haven’t read it yet. It’s not long, and it’s definitely worth the time you’ll spend reading.