Romola

[sawyl]

After two weeks of rather intermittent reading, I've finally finished George Eliot's dauntingly erudite novel Romola. Set in late 15th century Florence, it follows the fortunes of Tito Melema, a young Greek, and his reluctant wife Romola as they try to survive the turbid political scene.

The convoluted plot begins in 1492 when Tito arrives in Florence after being shipwrecked and sets about finding himself a patron. He soon meets Bardo Bardi, a blind philosopher, and falls in love with Bardo's daughter Romola. The pair agree to marry, even though Romola's dying brother has a vision that warns against the marriage.

After two years in Rome, Tito returns to Florence and becomes caught up in the politics of Charles VII's invasion. He also discovers that his adoptive father is alive and wants to avenge himself against the thankless son who failed to buy him out of slavery. Fearing that he may need funds to flee the city, Tito goes against the last wishes of Bardo and sells his father-in-law's precious library to the highest bidder. This causes an irreversible estrangement with Romola, who makes an attempt to run away only to turn back after meeting Savonarola on the road.

Although the first half of the novel is vividly painted and beautifully imagined, it suffers from such an excess of exposition and didacticism as to make it something of a slog. But eventually, persistence pays off and there are a handful of really first rate moments where everything changes.

Tito's first encounter with his estranged father is dazzling. In an unthinking moment, he denounces the man as a lunatic and then finds himself forced to stick to his assertion in order to avoid the pain of having to confess to his wife and his friends that he left the person in his early life in slavery, staying in comfortable Florence and living off his father's money rather than enduring a long and arduous journey to ransom him back. Tito's great betrayal of Romola — and of poor dead Bardi — is also wonderful. Although not physically violent towards his wife, his psychological approach is particularly nasty: locking them both in, pouring scorn on her hope that she might be able to buy back the libray, telling her that such a thing will not happen simply because he has set his word against it.

The sections with Savonarola, too, are particularly fine. Eliot gives the monk a real feeling of powerful spiritually, dazzlingly in the sermon he preaches just as Baldissare arrives in the Duomo seeking sanctuary, but also quietly and intently in the more intimate moments with Romola. Eliot's Savonarola is a man of great contrasts: a passionate visionary and a great intellectual; a humble man who rules the city with an iron grip; a man who would do almost anything to purify his beloved church.

As time passes Tito becomes increasingly involved in the politics of the Grand Council, while Romola involves herself in works of charity. When one of Tito's schemes goes wrong, he sells out his Medicean allies — including Romola's beloved godfather — in exchange for his own safety. Romola appeals to Savonarola to save her godfather, but the friar refuses and his fortunes begin to decline.

Despite holding a spectacular Bonfire of the Vanities during carnival time, Savonarola's temporal power begins to wane. When an attempt to validate his position with a Trial of Fire is rained off, the monk's grip on the city is broke and the people riot, providing the perfect cover for Tito's father to settle an old score. Romola, meanwhile, misses the whole thing haven fled to a plague village where she helps the locals to recover and so recovers her own senses of self and duty.

The second half of the book feels more successful than the first, with more time spent on plot and character, and less spent on scene setting. The high-points are, once again, Tito's great moments of faithlessness: his political betrayal of the Mediceans which leads to the death of Romola's godfather; and his personal betrayal of Romola in the form of his unofficial marriage with Tessa the peasant girl.

Eliot uses the second half of the book to explore the options open to Romola once she accepts the fundamental emptiness of her marriage. In giving up on happiness as a goal, she devotes her life to caring for others and, in the process, finds herself content. In this Romola is clearly intended to be read as a stand-in for a Victorian wife trapped in an unfortunate marriage and forced to find some way of coming to terms with her existence.

Tito's trajectory tells the same moral story from the opposite perspective. Unwilling to do anything that would cause him discomfort, he fails every moral test that life sets him. He fails to rescue his father from slavery, on the grounds that it would probably be pointless and would require hardships on his part. He fails to tell Tessa the peasant girl that they are not really married — the pair go through a sham ceremony overseen by a mountebank — simply because he does not want to deal with the consequences of Tessa's unhappiness. When confronted with the return of his father, Tito denies the man and compounds the problem by spinning an elaborate lie that gets the man thrown into prison when poor, broken Baldissare tries to confront him. And if this wasn't obvious enough, Romola spells out the message in the final epilogue: with no final goal other than the avoidance of unpleasantness, a man who desired nothing by the nicer things in life found himself committing appalling atrocities.

I'm not sure I'd really recommend Romola as a novel, even though I really enjoyed it. Despite being possessed of impressive period detail and moments of astonishingly wonderful writing, the book is a bit of a slog in places and I'd feel seriously guilty pushing it on anyone, knowing what I do of the pitfalls that lie ahead.