Amos Barton entra como nuevo vicario en la parroquia de Shepperton. Pronto quiere realizar cambios en la liturgia dominical mientras los parroquianos son reacios a cualquier tipo de cambio. En este momento, empieza una etapa en la vida de la comunidad en la que abundan los chismorreos y los prejuicios. Incluso la mujer de Amos Barton, la sacrificada Milly, no se libra de los comentarios de sus vecinos al acoger en su casa a una mujer cuando su propia situación económica es precaria. La reacción de la comunidad es implacable, reacción que se suaviza ante la tragedia que se avecina.

This was a short book (112 pgs), and I think it was one of her first (1857). I like her writing style and sense of humor, but this is a very sad book. So, I'm glad I read it because I want to add to my George Eliot reading experience. But it's really not one I'd recommend. ( )

So, Amos Barton...Thoughts on a Short Novel by George Eliot

A number of years ago an unknown neighbour left a massive copy of Middlemarch by George Eliot on the table in the lobby. (Strictly against the rules, I might add.)

Against my better judgement, knowing I would never read it, yet with a flicker of wishfulness that I wasn’t so intimidated by old and difficult books, so sure that I would find them dull or “beyond me”, and thus confirm my doubt that I had anything but the most pedestrian intelligence, I picked it up.

And put it down.

It remained on my shelf, amongst unread Hardy and untouched Austen, for a period of time. I don’t remember how long or how short. I do remember hefting it off the shelf one brave day and taking my usual reading position and starting in on the first page.

The language was enormous. Never mind that it was nearly a hundred and fifty years old. It was the tongue of an energetic master, a whip-strong language with a mind behind it bursting with energy and observation and thought. At first I was astonished, and thrilled, and moved, but then, wandering into chapter one, I was soon well lost. There was too much I couldn’t understand, too much I had to fight to put any meaning to at all.

I put the book away.

Sometime later, I picked it up again. And then again, always getting at most thirty pages in. I knew that if only I could get over the hump, I would love this book. Or at least, I hoped so. Finally I did the only thing left to me.

I took it to my mother’s in Manitoba, with only nonfiction besides, and stretches of time when there would be nothing else to do. It came alive.

I stopped worrying about the odd bit I didn’t get. I got into the music of her way of expressing herself. I allowed myself to be swept into poor Miss Brooke’s life. I thrilled at the way the author was able not only to collect together all the elements of a world but to make true sense of them, and to do it with words and phrases that seemed plucked out of heaven itself. It was an epiphany.

Fast forward ten years or so. In my cupboard wait two more Eliot books, Silas Marner and The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton. Both much shorter books than Middlemarch, though in an omnibus edition the three do fill the hand and weary the arm. Nevertheless! I had been holding onto these as after dinner mints—the kind long forgotten in pocket lint—and the time had finally come.

I got through Silas Marner unscathed and happy, though it had been a near thing. Poor old Silas. A good man, and I’m glad things worked out. But Amos Barton, now, that was another kettle of fish.

I finished it last night. I am going to tell you, sort of, how it ends, but I am also going to tell you how it begins and how it middles.

This is a very short tale, the earliest of the three, and perhaps Eliot was just learning her craft. Maybe no one had told her that you don’t write books like this. Her betters would surely not let her get away with it now.

We float into a thought-line, that of an opinionated and powerful narrator, identitiy never disclosed, the author herself, of course, who muses on the place and people, takes us into and out of their conversations as the subject matter pertains or fails to pertain to Amos Barton himself. She shows his strengths and his foibles equally, shows the people around him—those who love, those who mock, and those whose loyalties wobble when times are tough. She shows his wonderful wife and their thoughtless friend and the slow diminution of his wife’s health. And then the wife dies.

At this terrible moment, all of these (or many of these) ordinary gossiping not helpful people are touched by his grief and pitch in to buoy him through his poverty and sorrow. At last he is redeemed in their eyes, and his future, though bleached with loss, seems sure.

And then he loses his position as curate, and goes away. We see him once more and he seems at ease with his lot, but his daughter, his eldest daughter, has devoted her life to his care since she was ten years old. She has traded her own life for her mother’s, and though at least she is spared the whole health-whittling thing of childbirth ... it is not a happy end.

It is not so much a story as a wandering character study, though of course it is a story, too, and as with the others, Eliot’s voice is sublime. But for Amos Barton you must not skip the annoying characters or just find the plotline and ignore the descriptions (as of course I would never do) because this book is just life, unfolding in all its meaness and all its happiness and all its regrets, and the author pulls no punches, and no great lesson is learned, and we all just get older in the end.

So I can’t get it out of my head. She didn’t fix things. Not at all. She just laid them out.

Brava, Madame George.

http://finedayscriptorium.blogspot.ca/2016/11/so-amos-bartonthoughts-on-short-no... ( )

Amos Barton is an odd little novella, usually found grouped with two other novellas in Scenes of Clerical Life. I think Eliot intended it as a character sketch of an ordinary man who fails in his obligations to those around him. He is oblivious to the needs of others. Amos Barton isn’t a particularly effective member of the clergy and his parishioners have no particular regard for him -- neither the middle-class ones snug in their homes by the fire nor the more miserable ones found in the workhouses. He is simply a poor curate, possessed of a wife and more children than he can afford. Barton is unaware of how he is viewed by his parishioners (conceivably, a good thing, as Eliot notes). In turn, he is disdainful of the villagers under his care but pursues a friendship with a visiting nitwit Countess and her half-brother who rank above him socially. For all their claimed interest in Barton’s professional role, neither is possessed of any degree of moral rectitude. Barton’s reputation becomes compromised (however unreasoningly) and yet it is the novel’s only person of upright character and worth who pays for his weakness.

Part of the problem is that Barton is unsuited to his profession, focusing on irrelevancies that have no part in ordinary life. The Shepperton parishioners are equally part of the problem as they fail to exert themselves in understanding the man. The gap between is too great, Eliot aims some excellent barbs in describing the villagers. One character is described as “a childless old lady, who had got rich chiefly by the negative process of spending nothing”

Best quote: Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.

On the other hand, when the chips are down, it is the village community that actually steps forward to support Barton when he discovers how badly he has gauged his situation.

There really is no happy ending here. Except that ultimately some of Barton’s children manage to side-step their father’s fate in working at a career for which he is unsuited. If there’s a moral to this tale, it is that Eliot believes that Barton should have accepted the realities of his life and sought to understand the value of what was at hand.

Note: this is the one where Eliot devotes an entire paragraph to the superiority of cream fresh from the cow. It’s also the one where cream (or lack thereof) is the thing that triggers the final outcome. Perhaps it’s intended as a metaphor for the milk of human kindness? ( )