This weekend I heard someone talk about how much she dislikes Fingersmith, because the deceit bothers her. The layers of deceit were precisely what made that book compelling for me: compelling enough to read it from start to finish on one long plane ride. But I can understand feeling that there’s something sordid about a plot that draws the reader into a web of manipulation.
The Portrait of a Lady is full of deceit: layers of it, tangles of it, but James’s novel doesn’t feel sordid, and not only because of characters like Isabel Archer and Ralph Touchett. Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond practice large deceits, cruel ones, but their acts of deception are nevertheless compelling. There’s something wonderful in the coldness and audacity of them, the cool machinations and quietly laid plans. And, too, there’s something in the intimacy of Merle and Osmond that draws the reader in: the sense that when the two of them are alone there may be games and poses, but there aren’t masks, there’s something true.
James’s plot unfolds so perfectly: the timing of everyone’s movements is exquisite: the lines you could draw between America and England and Italy; the way that Caspar Goodwood and Henrietta Stackpole and Ralph Touchett and Lord Warburton and the Countess Gemini all end up in Rome; the way that each one then leaves it (or plans to leave it, in the case of the Countess); the way that Isabel herself leaves the city and then sets out to return to it.
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