Evan Harrington by George Meredith (1861)

This novel is both graced and encumbered by its complexity. Meredith's famous curlicued style is an intriguing mixture. It wafts and drifts around the plot and can't help but fascinate. His plotting in this one is particularly intricate also, and this is where he comes a little unstuck. There is a strong feeling that much of the toing-and-froing of the piece is simply manoeuvring. Whether this was because he wanted to communicate a complex reality (the good excuse) or whether perhaps he was wandering, trying to find a way out of his tangle he was happy with (the bad excuse) is difficult to decide, though I must admit I tend to the latter idea. This is the story of class, seen from the point of view of an individualist. The Harringtons have significant notions of grandeur; father Mel (known as The Great Mel), a tailor, who dies at the beginning, has schooled his children to think highly of themselves, and has himself hobnobbed with the nobility, slightly audaciously. His wife is tougher and more practical, with a no-nonsense dignity. Evan, their son, is well-educated and dreamy after bigger things than his inheritance of his father's tailoring business would predicate. Just back from Portugal, where he stayed with his sister Louisa, who has married well and become a countess, he reconnects with a young aristocrat he fell in love with there who has also returned. He has neglected to mention his humble background! In her country house, with his sister engineering for all she is worth, the scene is set for a comedy of matchmaking and class-deception. Under the comedy is some autobiography I think, which is oblique in its referencing of Meredith's own tailoring family. The story is also ballasted with some fine writing about love. A novel which teems with characters and situations in what seems an endless intricate web.