The Razor's Edge

The Razor's Edge is one of the most important novels of British writer W. Somerset Maugham's later years, first published in 1944. The story is told in the first person; "I" is both narrator and an observer and participant among the characters. The central figure, Larry Darrell, is a young American who served in the air force during World War I and witnessed a comrade die saving his life. That death violently shakes his faith in the meaning of life; after the war he refuses to enter university, refuses respectable work and the prescribed path of life, and breaks off his engagement to his fiancée Isabel, drifting alone through Chicago, Paris, India, and elsewhere, working as a miner, farmhand, and sailor while reading, thinking, and seeking answers for his soul. Around Larry the novel unfolds several other life threads: Isabel chooses a conventional marriage and a life of wealth; the socialite Elliott Templeton cultivates his respectability among salons and parties; Sophie, scarred by childhood misfortune, sinks into suffering; and the businessman Gray loses everything in economic turmoil. Their intertwined fates form a group portrait of the spiritual condition of post-war Western society. The title comes from the Katha Upanishad of India, suggesting that the path to salvation and enlightenment is as narrow and hard to walk as a razor's edge. In a calm, sharp yet warm tone, Maugham asks how one ought to live one's life; he offers no standard answer but returns the weight of choice to the reader.