"I remember reading this at school at being completely uninterested in the story. I remember the teacher droning on about basic plot allegories before we read each section; she would tell us what certain things “meant� before we had even seen them. She would explain how this portrays a vital part of American culture and a vital element of human nature. All in all we were told what to see in the book before we even began reading.

Perhaps she should have just let us read it first, and see what we took from it before being told how to read it. I hated it at the time. I hated being told that passages meant certain things when clearly criticism is just speculation. This wasn’t effective teaching: it was being told how to think. She should have prized open our minds and made us engage with it more. When I approached it again years later I did so with more of an open mind, I was determined to find more in the book than I’d been taught to see.

And I did. Lenny and George naively dream of the farm; they dream of a retreat where they can reside in friendship without having to answer to any master. They wouldn’t have to go to work; they can simply work for themselves. Running their own farm would mean that they are self-sustainable. They could grow crops for themselves and choose when they laboured: they would be free. Well George wants this. Lenny just wants a few rabbits to pet. The attractiveness of the dream draws in Candy, who is very old and very lonely. He doesn’t want to end up like his dog: put down because of his years. He wants someone to protect him and care for him in his advanced years. The three become united by this shared dream but it is nothing but fancy.

“Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan�. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin� about it, but it’s jus� in their head.�



Indeed, the American dream doesn’t exist in this book. Only harsh cold reality awaits the protagonists. Crooks, for all his cruel and understandable bitterness, was right in the end. The farm is just a dream. It is evocative of the loneliness within the human soul, and how we will always long for the impossible. It’s impossible because there is no sunset over the rainbow. Life doesn’t quite work like that. People don’t always get what they want. The world is a cruel unforgiving place here. This is embodied by Lenny; he is vulnerable and emotionally weak. He is completely unaware of the vicious strength he possesses. He never truly understands the situation. He almost walks through the world blind. The world he sees is different to that of everyone else’s.

So this is a story about the outsiders, about the unloved and misunderstood. This a story about those that long for an alternative to the drudgery of standard human existence, but have their expectations cut short. This is a story about how we judge people based upon their appearance and how we label them unjustly. This is a story that Mary Shelley would have loved, a story where a character with an innocent heart is destroyed by the world he should have been accepted by.

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Delia started reading Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory