Back and Forth from Paradise to Hell

Let us take the following as Axiomatic:  Paradise Lost is a Great Book.  It is deservedly in the Pantheon of Great Books.  Everyone who wants to be Well Read (a Noble Goal, that) should read it.  It is Brilliant, Beautiful, Clever, Thought Provoking and Stunning.  There has been nothing like it, nothing even close to it, ever written in the English language.

I just reread it (with my tutorial).  The last time I read it was when I was a senior in high school.  And my reaction:  a rather tedious book whose tedium is frequently interrupted by moments of lyrical and poetic beauty as stunning as anything ever written.  The high points of this book are jaw-droppingly good.  But, the connections between those high points--well, I could do without reading all of them again.  The problem is interesting--the poetry of this work is incredible--that Milton could pull this work off is nothing short of awe-inspiring.  But, the plot is simply too short for the book.  Satan, one of the most amazing figures in literature (and certainly a lot more interesting than his namesake in the Bible), is only in a fairly small portion of the book.  When Satan is around, the book ranges from Stunningly Great to Pretty Good.  When Satan isn't around, well, that's when the tedium tends to set in.  God and Jesus are, to be honest, terrible bores.  The histories of the world--both the creation account and the prophecy of what is to come after Eden--are ridiculously tedious.  But it is an odd tedium--take any small portion of it, and the poetry is incredible--but the poetry in much of the book has a narrative flow that is not compelling at all.  So, if you want to admire finely crafted poetic lines, then there is no bad part in the book.  But if you want your books to have things like interesting characters and plots, well, then much of  Paradise Lost is lacking, seriously lacking.

The narrative high points are the first two chapters when we see Satan in Hell, rising up to his further rebellion, the scene where Satan first sees Adam and Eve, the whole chapter covering the temptation and fall, and bits of the war in heaven and bits of the interaction of Adam and Eve.  Those parts of this book are as good as anything ever written. 

This then makes for an odd Great Book--Milton was a genius, and he picked a story that has some incredibly compelling plot developments and characters, but the story simply isn't long enough to sustain a book of the length he wanted to write.  The book is an epic in the mold of Homer and Virgil.  I didn't notice this the last time I read it because I had not yet read Homer or Virgil.  But, the way Milton deliberately apes the Great Epics is also incredibly brilliant.  From the idea of mortals simply being pawns in a great war of Divine beings, to the telling of the back story in the form of conversations between characters, Milton has captured the spirit of Homer and Virgil quite nicely.  But, his basic plot simply doesn't have the narrative breadth of Homer and Virgil's epics, and thus the book falls flat in parts.

Now as noted at the outset, this is unambiguously a Great Book.  But it falls into the category of uneven Great Books--books whose Greatness is obvious, but whose flaws are localized, so that the experience of reading them is much like repeatedly journeying up and down the mountain of greatness. If you haven't read it, do so--it is not to be missed.