By William Faulkner
There is some exquisite writing in this book. Faulkner’s prose conjures a unique world, with its own vividly recognizable atmosphere and inhabitants. Sanctuary naturally partakes of that world, which the author renders with careful and often surprising attention to pertinent details.
Apart from the great beauty of the writing and the pleasure of revisiting the world it evokes – a pleasure of which this Faulkner reader has never tired – I found little entertainment in Sanctuary apart from a few episodes of broad comic relief: the funeral in the gambling-den, Clarence Snopes, the antics of an irrepressibly dipsomaniacal infant. The characters, even the hero manqué, are unsympathetic, often repellent and mostly far-fetched. The central figure (hardly a heroine) is in a state of wild hysteria in every scene save the last in which she appears. In our post-feminist world it has become depressingly clear that the great masculine colossi of the twentieth-century American novel knew almost nothing about women; their female characters are marionettes of cardboard and greasepaint glimpsed through a fog of drink, infatuation and resentment. In Temple Drake, this tendency may well have found its archetype: though terrible things happen to her, their telling stirs no sympathy in the modern reader, only boredom and incredulity.
There are other women in the book besides Temple, but they are nearly all stock characters – the wronged but incurably faithful wife and mother, the tart (madam, actually) with a heart, the helpful but corruptible serving-maid, all of whom were well established in fiction long before this novel was written. Only two of the female characters ring true – the hero’s sister and her elderly, waspish aunt. But they are both middle-class characters, of a type whom Faulkner would have seen many examples. The others are all demimondaines, sensationalistically but unconvincingly rendered.
Faulkner wrote this book, we are told, as a ‘potboiler’ that might make him money. Apparently it did; Sanctuary is his best-selling novel. As a piece of genre fiction, however, it is a failure: by no means the sort of book you’d stay up at night reading because you absolutely have to know what happens next. On the contrary, there were times when I had to force myself back to it. But I did return, because in spite of all its manifest failings, Sanctuary is a work of art, a very beautiful one except in the places where it fails. But it couldn't be a work of art without those failures; if it had completely succeeded, it would have been No Orchids for Miss Blandish.
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