The Mill on the Floss

I just finished George Elliots The Mill on the Floss, which I liked, but not as much as Middlemarch, which I really loved.  Like MiddleMarch, Mill on the Floss doesn't really have a unified plot.  But in Middlemarch, the major plot arcs happen simultaneously, one to each of the three families, in Mill, the arcs are successive, and they feel badly tacked together.

In a sense, Mill could be looked at as three books -- "The childhood of Tom & Maggie Tulliver", "Tom pays off the family debts," and "Maggie Tulliver's disgrace."  Taken together, these stories provide an engrossing portrait of the rural English life of Elliot's childhood, but they're also somewhat static in themselves, particularly the first of them.  But even the story of Tom's coming of age is rather static, though it shouldn't be.  But Elliot elides the period of time from when he first starts making money till the point when he has enough to pay the family debts.  So instead, we see Tom only in his before and after states.  Finally, Maggie's story at the end is sort of a portrait of what it's like to be in such disgrace -- at the point when she gets ready to move on, the flood comes and conveniently wipes everything out.

Of course, all this carping does not mean I didn't enjoy the book.  I enjoyed it, but reading it so soon after Middlemarch, which I thought was superlative, it's hard to avoid the comparison.