![]() ![]() ![]() The narrator, Willie Ashenden, is a writer himself, and with a sigh accepts the ruthlessly competitive nature of the literary world. ![]() While the novel clearly relies on much first hand observation of the literary scene and its ambitious participants, the tone is more sombre and brooding. There isn’t much wicked satire in Cakes and Ale Maugham doesn’t indulge in bitchy barbs and witty put downs. Somerset Maugham’s wonderfully titled Cakes and Ale (1930), proclaims it to be a ‘wickedly satirical novel about contemporary literary poseurs and a skilfully crafted study of freedom’. The blurb on the back of the Vintage Classics edition of W. It’s a deeply iconoclastic novel that’s interesting enough, revealing as it does Maugham’s experiences of the literary world, but its lack of emotional disclosure makes it not entirely successful. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale attempts to show writers not as celestial beings that float above the hoi polloi, but as embarrassingly human, full of failure and weakness. ![]()
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