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Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers--Marquis and Earl of Belchamber, Viscount Charmington, and Baron St. Edmunds and Chambers--known familiarly as Sainty, is the scion of an ancient English aristocratic family. Behind him stretches a rogues' gallery of picturesque upper-crust scoundrels. But he is uninterested in riding to hounds or drinking or whoring in the great tradition of his forebears, and though he admires his tough-minded puritanical Scottish mother, he lacks her unrelenting moral self-assurance. Sainty is instead a sensitive soul, physically delicate, sexually timid, intellectually inclined, utterly honest, and thoroughly decent, but constitutionally incapable of asserting himself. When it comes to assuming the responsibilities of his inheritance, to managing his feckless younger brother Albert or fathoming his sly cousin Clyde, and, above all, to the essential business of marrying and continuing the family line, Sainty hasn't a prayer.… (more)
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It's like few other books I've ever read. The type here is very clear to us: a shy, timid, bookish young man who's had the misfortune to be born as the sole heir to his lordly father's estate. The book shines in the delicate way it portrays Lord Belchamber's character and his timidity, without making us dislike him. He is a person of, at times, moral force (he reminds one of Alexei Karenin from Anna Karenina), but this qualities can be a person's undoing if they're not strong enough to back it up. And yet...and yet...there's a delicate beauty in his weakness as well. Perhaps this book resonated so strongly in me because I saw myself in Belchamber. Not every strong character needs to be a hero or an anti-hero. And not every weak character needs to be some sort of comic laughingstock. I think there's room in literature to portray people as they are: weak and strong at the same time. Totally worth your time if you loved, for instance John William's STONER or anything by Wharton or Henry James.