Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins

[lunabee34]

Man and Wife by Wilkie Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this although not so well as No Name or Woman in White. Man and Wife is very humorous and satirical. Collins is constantly poking fun at the conventions of the time, and he consistently hits the mark when he makes fun of Lady Lundie--the affected, bossy, and manipulative social butterfly. His book was intended to shed light on Scottish marriage laws (which really do sound utterly ridiculous and not at all a good idea), and the story does a good job of revealing their potential for harm. Collins's other thesis is one that amuses me a bit. The main antagonist of the story is an athlete who essentially ruins his body and his mind through exercise. Now, I'm totally on Collins's side when he asserts that national obsession with sports to the exclusion of the arts and the cultivation of the intellect is A Bad Thing, Indeed. I also agree with his implicit thesis that excellent male athletes are forgiven many faults that they shouldn't be because of their athletic prowess and that something is wrong when masculinity is defined solely as a product of physical ability. But to the modern reader, his idea that most people who strenuously exercise are risking paralytic stroke is a bit silly. I have to admit that I found the storyline for the most part predictable (girl is ruined; ruiner declines to marry her; her best friend's fiance is put into a contrived situation in which he appears to be married to her; this problem comprises the bulk of the novel; at the end, the situation is resolved and the best friend's fiance is off the hook) until I got to the last fourth of the book. Then it takes a really unexpected and gripping turn that belies the humor of the beginning. The athlete who ruins our virtuous heroine decides to kill her after he finds a written confession of murder, and the method he employs is really ingenious. The confession is incredibly dark and detailed, and the athlete's mental journey from Asshole to Murderer is fascinating to read. I also loved the very end in which Lady Lundie gets her final comeuppance. I really didn't see that coming.



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Comments

[likeadeuce]

Wow, I have never heard of that and it sounds interesting!

[lunabee34]

It is! It's a quick read (IMHO) and very fun until you get to the end and it goes surprise dark and creepy. And then the last paragraph brings us right back to the lulz.

[chelseagirl]

Collins is often OTT, which is part of his fun, but I particularly loved his mocking of the physical fitness obsessive.

Erm, not feeling well and skipping the gym today. Might be deflecting my guilt. ;-)

I especially love the way Collins plays with legal issues.

[lunabee34]

I hope you get to feeling better!

I just can't believe that was a real legal issue. I wonder what the point was having a law like that. One of the lawyers said at one point that the law was intended to prevent men from making promises and then declining to keep them (which I get that was a real problem), but this law seems to have had so many more consequences besides that.

I'm just struck now when I read novels from that era by how much of their plots would be really hard to write about now. In an internet, cell phone camera, surveillance era, going somewhere and pretending to be someone else (or at the very least not divulging your past) is really hard. It must have been so freeing for some people to know that if shit went bad they could just pick up and go somewhere else, to another country even, and never be found out.

[chelseagirl]

His legal stuff was all thoroughly researched. There were/are some strange laws out there!

It's been long enough since my dissertation, but I'm pretty sure it's Collins who trained as a barrister but never practiced. And Dickens was a court reporter and Trollope was the son of a lawyer of some sort and did serious detailed research even though he wasn't one himself, so yes, I'm sure it *was* Collins who'd actually read law.

[lunabee34]

I think that knowledge really shows in all their work. And it was (still is, really) such a twisty thing and a source of such trouble for some people in real life that it made such good plot fodder.