Volume 23, Number 1 · February 5, 1976
"No, but I read the book."
By Michael Wood
Barry Lyndon
directed by Stanley Kubrick
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
directed by Miloš Forman
The Story of Adèle H
directed by François Truffaut
'My object,' Thackeray said of Vanity Fair, 'is to indicate, in cheerful terms, that we are for the most part an abominably foolish and selfish people…all eager after vanities. Everybody is you see in that book….' Everybody is in The Luck of Barry Lyndon too, the novel Thackeray had published three years earlier. Although eager may be too strong a word. Barry Lyndon is anemic picaresque, something like a novel by Smollett without Smollett's rage and energy, a languid, rambling narrative redeemed only by the grace of Thackeray's writing and the poise of his throwaway comments ('He was an admirable soldier, dissolute, and a drunkard.' 'He was quite in the wrong…. But, like a gentleman, he scorned to apologize'). There is a very funny scene in which Barry, not the brightest of fellows, tussles verbally with Dr. Johnson—'he was accompanied by a Mr. Buswell of Scotland, and I was presented to the club by a Mr. Goldsmith, a countryman of my own'—and there is one extraordinary sequence in which Thackeray outdoes even Stendhal on the disasters of war:
Review, 3516 words
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