59. Max Beerbohm, ZULEIKA DOBSON

Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl, but girl is cruel to boy. So boy decides to kill himself. Girl changes her mind and decides to love him so boy will change his mind, but when boy changes his mind, girl goes back to her original attitude, and thus boy and girl are never quite in concert.

We know the protagonists of Max Beerbohm's ZULEIKA DOBSON are shallow, because the narrator makes this clear from the start. Zuleika is a rich dilettante known mostly for her traveling show of magic tricks, who has come to stay with her grandfather at Oxford at the fictional Judas College.* When her path crosses with the Duke of Dorset, they could be a perfectly shallow match: He's an indifferent scholar for whom his vast wealth is really no big deal, who enjoys drinking with his club the Junta. But he decides that Zuleika must be his -- and, embarrassed by his elaborate declaration of love (involving sheep, no less!), she rejects him with a sniff. The Duke retreats to his friends, expecting them to cheer him up, but they declare they are in love with Zuleika too -- and if she won't have them, they won't have anyone.

ZULEIKA DOBSON is Beerbohm's only novel and I wish he had written more fascinating little dark fables like this one. What the Duke decides to do, and the way he and Zuleika ping-pong between trying to figure out their feelings and act how their breeding dictates they should, is so bizarre and switchback-filled that abruptly in the middle of the book I realized that I wasn't engrossed in boy meets girl any more. I was lost in a much greater allegory which delivered a peculiar punch at the end.

Progress of LN VS. ML: 48 read, 52 unread.

Next up on LNVSML: Joseph Conrad's THE SECRET AGENT (#46). Read it on Dailylit, like me!

*As I discovered by perusing this list of fictional Oxford colleges. Is it because of libel laws that English writers are so loath to set their works in colleges that exist?