Maugham is obviously a very gifted writer and he can create characters that come to life, and he also has a refreshing lack of sentimentality, but the biggest flaw of the book, and a fatal one at that, is simply that nothing that happens in it grabs your attention. Maybe it's because of the detached viewpoint of the narrator, maybe it's because it's depicting a time so long ago and so different that I can't relate to it at all, but the fact is this book was enough to convince me never to read Maugham again. If this is his masterpiece and I was frankly bored with large parts of it why would I waste my time with inferior works of his?