Adam Bede by George Eliot

George Eliot's Middlemarch is widely considered one of the world's most accomplished novels. It is certainly one of my favorites. What stands out most about it, for me, is the depth of the portrayal of the characters, so that every one seems real, with the mixture of good and less-than-good traits which makes up a human being. Adam Bede, Eliot's first novel, fails to meet quite this high standard, but it is very good indeed.

The plot is not especially creative or unique: a farmer's niece is courted in secret by a rich landowner's grandson, with an easily guessed unfortunate result. The tragedy which results affects the whole community, particularly the carpenter who also loves the girl. Eliot takes this framework, and makes of it an almost faultless depiction of a people, place, and time.

Two aspects of the novel especially stand out. The evocative landscape descriptions paint a picture for the mind and create a mood more successfully than almost any I have ever read. The dialogue, much of it in the vernacular, skillfully delineates the educational and cultural level of each character, giving each one a unique voice.

The only serious problem here is that the good characters are just too good to be true, so that they become less than believable. Adam, the title character, is more well built, more handsome, more talented, more admired, more principled, more everything than seems humanly possible. He does have one brief flash of temper, but is sorry immediately after. His eventual love interest, Dinah, is so sweet, self-sacrificing, and saintly as to be almost a caricature. The two remind me of Dagney Taggert and John Galt, the super-couple from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. And then there's Adam's brother Seth, who apparently never experiences even a slight pang of jealousy when all the characters, including their own mother and the girl Seth would like to marry, openly love Adam best.

Happily, the rest of the characters are all exceptionally well rounded and believable, even the two misbehaving ones. The pretty, childlike country girl, Hetty Sorrel, and her seducer, the local squire, are sympathetically pictured as thoughtless and impulsive rather than as evil.

You may not always read Victorian novels, but when you do, Adam Bede would be a good choice.