The Voyage Out

The Voyage Out / Virginia Woolf
NY: Grafton, 1978, c1915.
382 p.

And now on to Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out. It's not hard to understand why this one is fairly hard to find in hard copy (my copy, the paperback above, came from my usual sources of secondhand bookshops). It is really not that good. 

You can feel that Woolf is already interested in the themes she continues to explore -- there are long drawn out days of boredom, parties, every shade of interactions explored -- there are also different things like South America, shipboard life, and very strange and emotionally constipated explorations of first love. 

There is also the first appearance of Clarissa Dalloway and her husband Richard, as they hitch a ride on the ship from one Eurpean port to another. The shipboard life was interesting but once the characters arrive in South America and take a house in a spot full of English people, the book became interminable to me. I did finish it, unfortunately -- I have seldom been so angry about an ending that felt ridiculous, unnecessary, and emotionally manipulative. 

So what's the plot? Rachel Vinrace is 24, her father is the ship's captain, and she has been raised as if in a convent -- she is extremely naive, inexperienced and socially awkward. Her aunt and uncle have been asked along on this trip, and it's her aunt (who doesn't particularly like her) who serves as chaperone in South America. There is a hotel full of English and European guests near their house there, and they interact with all the odd characters including a duo of young men, one of whom Rachel falls in love with. 

The repeated scenes with Rachel and Terence acting like they are dimwitted and rhapsodizing about love - are we in love? we are in love. what is love? - etc. were so tiresome and overdone. I am sorry, Virginia, but these characters felt like stage actors in some strange late modernist play. 

Most of the rest of the book focuses on the cast of characters in this hotel; who are they from the outside, from their own inner view, their class, their relationships, their habits of killing time -- everyone seems like they are simply in a waiting room here. The writing shows some brilliance and the roots of much of Woolf's work. But the characters were only middling and I was so bored so much of the time! 

It's the ending that really made this book unforgivable for me. That was what we got for sticking it out? Really? I felt so annoyed by the conclusion, upset and disappointed by where she went. So as you can likely tell by now, this is definitely NOT my favourite Woolf, and in fact I wouldn't recommend it. A novel cut down by half and focusing mainly on the sea voyage would have, in my opinion, been so much stronger.