“Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whiskey and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither.”

Because of the audiobook, I mistakenly thought the publication date for this novel was 2006. During the end credits, the narrator announced that the original copyright date was 1925, which makes much more sense given the themes of female independence and the romantic writing style.

For the first chapter or two, I felt a little lost, but I quickly got sucked into the drama of Kitty's life. Desperate to marry before her sister, Kitty accepts the proposal of bacteriologist Walter Fane, a reserved-but-dignified man who is very much in love with her. She does not return his ardor, however, and has an affair with another man. The incident leads to Kitty and Walter traveling to China in the midst of a cholera epidemic.

As the focal character, Kitty proves herself to be not only shallow and judgmental, but also impulsive, emotional, and surprisingly self-aware. She fascinates me in the same way as Blanche from Tennessee William's A Streetcar Named Desire. I expected her to undergo a transformation by the end of the story, and she did, but not quite in the way I expected (mainly, I thought that Kitty would grow to genuinely love Walter). In fact, what happened in the third act came very much as a surprise to me, but even with its sudden end, the story somehow tied together all the threads of Kitty's life.

Walter is an easy character to sympathize with, and his combined qualities of brilliance, snobbery, coldness, and passion all coalesce to create a complex figure. Charlie, Kitty's lover, is perhaps one of the best villains I've ever encountered; his sociopathic charisma makes it clear why Kitty fell for him. The conversations between Kitty and Charlie made me stand in the middle of the room with my headphones in, doing nothing else, so intent was I on focusing on their repartee. And then there's Waddington, an affable man Kitty meets in China, who is of course the most likable character of them all.

Reading the two poems alluded to in this book enhanced my reading experience, one of them being Percy Shelley's sonnet, the other "An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog", which plays a crucial role in the story.

I look forward to watching the movie adaptation and reading more of Maugham's works!