“Then he saw that the normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect, of body or of mind: he thought of all the people he had known, he saw a long procession, deformed in body and warped in mind, some with illness of the flesh and some with illness of the spirit. He could feel a holy compassion for them all. They were the helpless instruments of blind chance”. This is the reflection which, endorsed by the book’s author on the protagonist, reflects the conceptual design that pervades the work and serves him to explain much of the human misery he confronts the main character with and perhaps, one might guess, also his own. If we think of humans as beings settled on four fundamental pillars, the body, represented by the physical or material aspects; the soul, by the spiritual, moral or mood disposition; the mind, by the rational or intellectual; and the heart, by the emotional or passional, then any defect in one of them will unbalance the owner of such flaw and make him limp and stumble through life as if a table with one leg shorter than the other three.
Philip, the lad whom the story follows from when, already having lost his father, loses his mother victim of a miscarriage, and up to his thirties, an age at which he makes the reflection which starts this review, is the vehicle that Somerset Maugham uses to show the hardships a human being with one of his pillars deficient or poorly compensated must deal with as he trudges through life. In fact, as was disposed by fate, misfortune, or for those who are believers, God's will, Philip was born with an ugly physical defect consisting of a club-foot, a deformity that causes his owner to limp, prevents the practice of sports and even dancing. Such calamities when aided by a loving mother, a supportive family upbringing and an empathic social environment, have good prospects for improvement and thus do not affect the vital balance. But this is not the case of Philip who, orphaned of father and mother in his early years, is taken up reluctantly by his uncle, a scrupulous Anglican vicar, imposing and petulant, and his wife, a sentiments-frigid woman submitted to the arbitrary and loveless indifference of her husband.
