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书评，不过也有点儿内容介绍。

Book Review: The Gadfly

[HARRYROOLAART.COM] - E.L. Voynich (Ethel Lilian), an author virtually unknown to us, published The Gadfly (1904) to rave reviews. Her novel, set in Italy in the 1800's, a tumultuous time of revolt and uprisings, features the hero as a mysterious satiricist hired by revolutionaries to set a nation into revolt. At once a romance, tragedy and heroic story, Voynich leaves us with passionate characters, an excellent plot, and expertly incorporates them into the author's daring and controversial theme; one that shocks and renders this novel’s lasting originality indisputable.

In short: if religion is the opiate of the masses, then Voynich’s The Gadfly effectively places its readers in a clinic to “kick the habit”. The book’s title page clearly forewarns us of what is to come; it poses the thematic question: “What have we to do with Thee, Thou Jesus of Nazareth?” Set in and around the year 1846, the story begins in the town of Leghorn, Italy and the tumultuous events surrounding Italy’s Youth Movement and its attempt to liberate itself from the Austrians and the country’s clerical hypocrisy.

The town of Leghorn, as this week’s harryroolaart.com readers know, features prominently in other reviews on our site. Historically, British commerce and interests in this Italian port were present for well over a century preceding the events of this novel. In keeping with this, Voynich chose as her main hero a young British student named Arthur Burton.

The Gadfly chronicles the events of Arthur’s life as he moves from being a theological student with Padre Montanelli (his father figure) to the life of a satirist, revolutionary, and great enemy of the church. Voynich portrayal of his protagonist (Arthur Burton) and his antagonist (Padre Montanelli) may be clearly seen in the following passages. In the first, we see Arthur’s predilection towards a benevolent world, in the second Montanelli’s view of the world as malevolent:

[ARTHUR] … was particularly sensitive to the influence of scenery, and the first waterfall that they passed threw him into ecstasy which was delightful to see; but as they drew nearer to the snow-peaks he passed out of this rapturous mood into one of dreamy exaltation that Montanelli had not seen before. He would lie for hours motionless in the dark, secret, echoing pine-forests, looking out between the straight, tall trunks into the sunlit outer world of flashing peaks and barren cliffs. Montanelli watched him with a kind of sad envy.

[MONTANELLI]… sighed. “I used to see those things once.”
“Do you never see them now?”
“Never. I shall not see them any more. They are there, I know; but I have not the eyes to see them. I see quite other things.”
“What do you see?”
[Montanelli] pointed to the valley below them. Presently the sun, red as a glowing coal, dipped behind a jagged mountain peak, and all the life and light deserted the face of nature. Straightway there came upon the valley something dark and threatening, sullen, terrible, full of spectral weapons.
“Padre!” Arthur rose, shuddering, and drew back from the precipe. “It is like hell.”
“No, my son,” Montanelli answered softly, “it is only like a human soul.”

What follows must be understood by reading the novel itself. A war erupts within Arthur’s soul, a war between good and evil, a war in which Arthur is deeply drawn into Montanelli’s view of the world while simultaneously battling that view with all of his journalistic, satirical, and physical abilities.

The plot incorporates the romance of Arthur and Gemma, a singularly striking woman of integrity, a heroic figure who is not encumbered by the malevolence clouding Arthur’s mind. Gemma may even be considered more heroic than the hero himself. No one who opens this book can fail to be engrossed by the vivid and convincing manner in which each character plays his part and each incident follows the other…as any novel with a good plot must.

This truly is a book the power of which cannot be questioned. HARRYROOLAART.COM gives The Gadfly a 4 (out of 5) star **** rating.

Ethel Voynich, an English woman, was married to a Polish revolutionary. Although the actual date for publication is disputed (some copies show this date to be 1897, others, 1904), and although she wrote other books, the author was never to repeat the success of this book, her first. The novel was extraordinarily popular in Russia, before and after the Revolution, and in Communist China as well. The ideologies fought for are socialistic, and anti-religious at their core, though the former does not detract from the fact that the book's characters are truly heroic in the rational sense of the word.

Recently, it has been reported to us that the book was, in fact, made into a movie by the Russians (with music by Shostakovich), turned into a play, as well as having been made into three operatic versions.