As inventive a novel as it is entertaining and philosophical, ‘Orlando’ is Woolf’s meditations on society, gender, conformism, literature and poetry, life, and time. For its time, this novel is bold and ahead for it dares to achieve something wonderfully imaginative by leaping out of the common boundaries of literature and the mind.
A novel that is subbed as ‘a biography’, it follows the life of its protagonist Orlando throughout four centuries, forgetting the traditional calendars and timeline as the author Ruth Ozeki once said ‘Forget the clock. It has no power over time.’ Starting in the sixteenth century, the narrator/biographer of Orlando follows him through the centuries as he serves the Queen, falls in love, breaks his heart, tries poetry, travels the world, and even goes through a sex change as he becomes a woman, and then finds herself a husband and becomes a mother, we finally see this novel comes to its serious and completing end in the early twentieth century.
While I knew about the changes of sexes of its protagonist, I didn’t know that this novel also covers four centuries of United Kingdom and presents insightful commentary on it; reminiscent of Qurratulain Hyder’s masterpiece in Urdu literature ‘River of Fire’ which covers 2500 years of India’s history. The light tone of this novel along with its playfulness as Orlando travels throughout centuries and different countries like Turkey and to different England at different times, reminded me also of yet another masterpiece, Voltaire’s ‘Candide’; in that novella, we also have a protagonist, much like Orlando, called Candide who travels and matures through time as he experiences much of what the world around him.
But while Hyder’s long novel talked about India’s history and cultural diversity throughout the ages, and Voltaire’s short novella presented a beautiful and timeless philosophy about living positively amidst chaos, Woolf’s novel is about England and the Western life and how it changed throughout the centuries, told through the perspective of one person being the perfect subject of this continuity of change and its effects.
We see how different societies pressure us differently to conform to its norms or run the risk of feeling alienated; that the two sexes aren’t as inherently different, where a man shares feminine qualities and vice versa, but it’s the society that so widely and starkly distinguishes them; how we not only move fluidly through sexes but also through different selves that we’ve lived and imagined.
More specifically, Woolf is also critical of the Victorian Age where morality became fixed and rules were set on how one should life; how this age’s literature became dry due to its criticism, whereas literature and poetry are far apart from fame or money – it is about the self and its growth; how nature, the Turk gypsy claims, is far more important than the palaces and familial lineages.
Overall, while Woolf’s meditations on these mattering
themes and the insights she reaches make this novel admirable, what makes it
adorable is her loveliest writing – oh it is so heart-touching! – and her
entertaining playfulness and lightness about her protagonist and his/her
journey. Beautifully done!
Ratings: 5/5 ***** August 18, 2021_