Review: The Painted Veil - W. Somerset Maugham

I initially wanted to read this book because I watched the movie adaptation on Netflix one night when I was scrolling through the options, struggling to find something that piqued my interest. Finally I settled on this movie, and to be honest, I didn’t expect much from it. But by the end I was actually crying, something that doesn’t happen that often. So since I enjoyed the movie so much I decided to read the book, since I am of the opinion that the book will (almost) always be better than the movie. 

The story is about a young woman from London, Kitty, who marries a bacteriologist, Walter, who lives in HongKong. She does so mostly to spite her mother and save herself from spinsterhood. She soon finds that she does not really love or even like her husband, and she is bored and unsatisfied with her life. She starts up an affair with a charismatic, charming Englishman, but when they are discovered by her husband her world crumbles. The lover leaves her and her husband forces her to join him in a mission to help clear up a cholera epidemic in a remote Chinese town. Kitty is convinced it is a suicide mission and that she will die there. This is where the book and the movie diverge, and I must say I liked the movie a lot better. 

In the book Kitty, in my opinion, continues to be weak and shallow, even though she apparently has some epiphanies about the meaninglessness of life and people’s petty actions. In the remote village she comes to terms with the fact that her lover is not the man she thought he was and she falls out of love with him. But once she returns to HongKong, she falls right back under his spell. At the same time she seems to see the good in her husband, who is devoted to stopping the epidemic, but still she almost despises him because he bores her. I feel like Kitty never really redeemed herself in the book, and Walter and Kitty’s relationship was left pretty much unresolved. 

In the movie Kitty also comes to the realization that her lover was worthless from the start, and she starts to pick up the pieces of her life and string them together to something meaningful. During this work she slowly becomes aware that her husband is considered a good man by everyone else in the village and she finally starts to see the good in him. Slowly they come together and in the movie they find redemption and forgiveness together. Which I thought was a much better ending than in the book. 

The character of Walter is also quite different in the movie. In the book it is much harder to appreciate his good qualities, because we see him mostly through Kitty’s eyes, and even though she finally starts to appreciate him, she still sort of despises him. In the book there is no redemption for him either, while in the movie the two forgive each other for their mistakes. 

So in this case I would recommend watching the movie rather than reading the book. Shocking, I know! I gave the book 2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads, but I would probably give the movie 5 stars.