书评理解

Rain is the product of Maugham and Hexton's 1916 trip to the South Pacific. One of his destinations was Samoa. Among maugham and Hackton's passengers on the boat to Pago, the capital of eastern Samoa, were a missionary and his wife and miss Thompson, who was going to western Samoa to work as a barmaid. Miss Thompson had brought a phonograph, and she played music in her room all day and had parties, making everyone else restless. Maugham never spoke to Miss Thompson, and only once did he speak to the preacher and his wife. He began to make up a story. Miss Thompson had a run-in with the missionary, he wrote: A prostitute flew in from Hawaii and landed in Pago Pago. There's the preacher and his wife, there's the writer. They all sought refuge here because of an outbreak of measles. The missionaries thought that the prostitute's profession had ruined her, that she was a terrible and shameful woman... The exoticism amplifies the sense of strangeness and isolation between the characters, and the tropical climate adds to the tension. Dr McPhail is the reader's point of reference, standing between Mr Davidson's integrity and Miss Thompson's worldliness. He began to pay attention to the behavior of the other characters, observing each one with the indifference of a doctor, judging only when it mattered.