I’m glad I stuck it out and read the entire book. Henry James’s style takes some getting used to, but he can communicate subtle emotions in his descriptions and conversations. While it’s easy to lose track of who is saying what to whom, the convoluted prose represents a bold attempt to record the fleeting nature of our consciousness. This finely nuanced way of describing the interior working of his characters, rather like a landscape of a sunny, cloudy, windy day. I also admire the way James challenged himself to tell an off-center story. The protagonist doesn’t appear until the book is well underway. I started the book after first watching the film, and thought this was an innovation of the film to allow Helena Bonham Carter a star-turn as Kate Croy, a character who combines two roles, that of friend of the protagonist and at the same time the antagonist of the story. When the protagonist, Millie, finally does appear, she does not so much act as is acted upon, thus evoking the common etymological root of patient and passive.
There are many instances of fine description. In the opening scene, Kate goes to visit her father, Lionel. Waiting for him—he was out—she registers the room. The upholstery of glazed cloth on the armchair gave “the sense of the slippery and of the sticky.” One’s reaction is that we’ve been given a description of his character.
When Milly and her traveling companion, Mrs. Stringham arrive in London, and are at a table with twenty other guests at the home of Kate’s aunt, Mrs. Lowder, the prose picks up, matching the glitter of the occasion. A couple of sentences I like very much: “It almost appeared to Milly that their fortune had been unduly precipitated—as if properly they were in the position of having ventured on a small joke and found the answer out of proportion grave” (p. 98 of Norton edition). I like the use of “precipitated.” Shortly before, Milly had been sitting on a rock at a precipitous point in the Alps when she resolved to cut short the continental tour and proceed immediately to London. And then there is this: “Mrs. Lowder’s other neighbor was the Bishop of Murram—a real bishop, such as Milly had never seen, with a complicated costume, a voice like an old-fashioned wind instrument, and a face all the portrait of a prelate. . . .” (p. 99). Well, the last clause was admittedly a disappointment after hitting so well with the wind instrument, but two out of three ain’t bad.
Not a book for everyone, which is why I only give it four stars, but I enjoyed it very much and feel it repaid the time and attention I devoted to it. ( )

The only James I’d read prior to this was the novella The Turn of the Screw which I didn’t blog at the time. It did little to prepare me for the mammoth effort needed to get through this pile of prose. I think prose is the right word for what James has created here. To be honest I’m not so sure.

From the first page to the last, I couldn’t wait for this to end. I didn’t care less about the characters, mostly because, rather than simply describe them, James felt the need to pile layer upon layer of turgid detail over them burying who they actually were under a slurry of endless subordinate clauses.

Someone somewhere online said he was a genius for this creative writing. No. Virginia Woolf is a genius for creative writing. James is not. His writing is needlessly opaque and takes verbosity to the limit. However, he has made a name for himself by doing so and that’s one of the reasons this work is well-known. But this is literature to give pleasure to the writer, not the reader; what was in fact a decent plot was almost totally destroyed by overelaboration.

So, what was the plot? Well, in a nutshell, Kate and Merton, secretly betrothed, befriend Milly, a wealthy young woman with a terminal illness. Kate’s ploy is for Merton to marry Milly and thus inherit her wealth leaving them set up to marry with money. Can they make this work? Will their consciences get the better of them? Will Milly discover the plan? This is a truly great storyline and one of the only reasons this book scrapes into my “good” category from “mediocre.”

Sadly, the answers to these questions lie under the rubble of James’ writing. Dig for them if you will. All you’ll probably end up finding though is the cold corpse of your own interest. ( )