Philip Carey is born around 1880 in England. By age nine he has lost both of his parents and is sent to live with his childless uncle and aunt at a vicarage. Philip has a club foot, which he calls his deformity. It shapes his thinking through his early years as he grows up in boarding schools and is routinely ridiculed by his peers.

He inherits a small fortune from his parents which has to last him through his youth and education. As he comes of age, without a strong guardian, he drifts from one adventure to the next.

As a youth he drops out of school and travels to Germany to study. When he gets tired of that life, he spends a few years in Paris trying to become a painter, until he learns that he does not really have any talent.

Finally he goes back to London and enters medical school.

While getting an education and pursuing cultural and intellectual goals through the people he associates with, he is getting drawn into an abusive and hopeless love relationship with a waitress without class, aspiration, intelligence or any other perceptible positive attributes. This relationship torments him over a period of years, drains him of his limited funds and almost ruins him at the end.

As he nears age 30, he manages to finish medical school. He realizes it’s time for him to make some sense of his life.

Of Human Bondage is a long book of 555 pages, and it seemed endless while I read it and quite boring in some passages. There is really not much of a plot, but endless narration and exposition, accompanied by little dialog. The reader lives inside of Philip’s head most of the time, and is forced to follow along with his juvenile thinking and illogical reasoning.

Philip is a hapless, conniving, and flawed character, and I found him one of the least likable protagonists I have encountered. In real life, I don’t think I’d want to be around him or know him. For the most part, I thought of him as a damned fool.

Reading this book, I learned much about life in England at the end of the 19th century, the division of the classes, the lives of the working class, and the aspirations of the upper class, whose goals are being artists, intellectuals, writers and who somehow see themselves as a class of humans above everyone else – until their money runs out.

The Modern Library ranked Of Human Bondage No. 66 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Published in 1915, the work is obviously autobiographical, even though Maugham said: “This is a novel, not an autobiography, though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention.”

For instance, Maugham had a difficult childhood after losing his mother when he was a little boy at age 10 and being sent to his childless uncle and aunt. His uncle was emotionally cold. Likewise, Philip Carey lost both parent by age nine and had to live with his uncle, a heartless, cold, overly religious and stingy man.

Maugham had a strong speech impediment, a stammer that haunted him all his life. Philip had a club foot.

Maugham didn’t want to become a lawyer like other men in his family. He eventually trained and qualified as a doctor. Philip didn’t want to become a clergyman. After trying to become an artist, and discovering he didn’t have any talent, he trained and qualified as a doctor in the end.

There are many passages where Maugham writes intensely about Philip’s thinking and feeling, so intensely that it seems very real.

Maugham was one of the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s.

Of Human Bondage is a very long, sometimes tedious novel, and difficult to read because of the general lack of likability of most of its characters. However, it captivated me and I kept reading, thinking about how challenging life was for working people in those days in England, the world’s superpower of the time.

I have grown through reading Of Human Bondage.

Some years ago there was a movie titled “The Postman” with Kevin Costner that was loosely based on this novel by science fiction writer David Brin.

There is nothing science fiction about The Postman. It’s a post-apocalyptic story that plays in Oregon.

The book was first copyrighted in 1985 and Brin, being a science fiction writer, created an all-out nuclear war that took place in the early 1990-ies and that brought down civilization worldwide.

I like to read science fiction written about a time way in the future from the writer’s present perspective, which also happens to be the present time for me. To do that, you have to not read a new book for 25 or more years.

This story takes place in the 2010 to 2012 timeframe, referencing the war that took place 16 years before the start of the story.

The immediate aftermath of the war caused a three-year-winter and lawlessness. Massive extinction took crops, animals and people. In the U.S., the government collapsed, and civilization was reduced to marauding bands of violent survivalists and homesteaders who sometimes banded together for mutual support and protection in small communities.

Gordon Krantz, the protagonist, is a lone survivor who wandered from St. Paul all the way to eastern Oregon over a period of 16 years, keeping a journal of his travels, surviving somehow off the scraps left by a looted civilization. When the story begins he is robbed of all his possessions by bandits that outnumbered and outgunned him. Faced with imminent death from freezing and starvation in winter in the mountains in eastern Oregon, he must get creative quickly.

When he stumbles upon a corpse of a former postman in a Post Office Jeep, he takes the uniform for warmth and the bag as a container – and then he has an idea that changes his life and that of all the people he encounters.

Like in most apocalypse stories, there must be some evil besides just the natural disasters that cause impossible situations for the people. In Stephen King’s The Stand, that’s Randall Flagg, the dark lord that takes over Las Vegas and builds an evil empire. In The Postman, the evil people are, ironically, the remaining militant survivalists who concentrated in the Pacific Northwest before the war, digging bunkers, hoarding supplies and ammunition, training in hunting and warfare, with the sole objective to survive in the case of a holocaust. As it turns out, the survivalists, due to competition with each other, pretty much kill each other off, but in the end, after things settle down, they have coalesced into an empire of abuse, slavery, and exploitation – feudalism in the American mainland. And they go to war against the villages and settlements who try to survive against all odds and build a new civilization.

Gordon, unwittingly and not really a hero, through the circumstances he creates for himself, becomes key to the solution of this conflict.

The Postman is a captivating read, stronger in the first two-thirds of the book which deals with his discoveries. Things get complicated in the end, and the climax is somewhat quick with a deus-ex-machina-flavored solution in the end.

Overall, The Postman is a good, credible and entertaining story of a post-apocalyptic America.

Rating: ** 1/2