Of Mice and Men

I've been reading John Steinbeck's classic Of Mice and Men these last two weeks. The book can be considered to be a light read, with only 113 pages thick. An avid reader with better discipline and focus would probably be able to finish reading it in one sitting. However, I on the other hand suffers from the habit of wanting to take in word for word any literature that I read, hence I read very slowly. Coupled with the fact that I have a short term attention span, which means that my interest would quickly wane after about 30 minutes of reading, has contributed to the reason why it has taken me close to 2 weeks to finish reading the book.

I have had Of Mice and Men ever since I was in secondary school. In fact, I won the book as a prize for getting the best grade in the English subject in my school at the time (I have to admit standards were not high at the school at the time...). Although the book can be considered student-friendly in terms of its light content and size, I have to say the American colloquial language that the author uses in the book hardly makes it suitable for an English student who reads it with the intention to improve his command of the language. Not to mention some extent of vulgar language used in it. But apparently the book is required reading material in high schools in the USA, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, perhaps in part to bring awareness to the societal errors in which Steinbeck aims to bring into light in his book.

The Story

The book tells a story of two migrant workers in California, USA during the Great Depression in the 1930s – George Milton: small in stature, intelligent, and cynical, but caring; and Lennie Small: physically strong, but dim-witted. They come to work in a ranch in Soledad, California with the dream to make big money, with the hope that one day they get to fulfil their shared dream of settling down on their own piece of land.

However, Lennie's dim-wits threatens this dream of theirs, and George keeps having to bail Lennie out of trouble, even at the expense of his own potential and happiness. In the Malay language, the best phrase to describe someone like Lennie would probably be 'bangkai bernyawa', or the living corpse. As I read the book, especially when coming towards the end, I couldn't help feeling how troublesome he is not just to his friend George, but even to himself that he would probably be better off dead. It speaks a lot of George's own patience and loyalty to Lennie and in the book it explains a little bit how and why George came to have this sense of duty to his friend.

Would this odd-couple survive the odds and come out tops with their dreams? I have to admit I did not quite expect the story to end the way it does. But if you have not read it and you want to know what happened at the end, you can always find a copy of it and read it yourself. It only has 113 pages anyway.

Interesting Fact

One of the things that baffles me a little bit about the book is the title. Apart from a reference made to a mouse at the beginning of the story when Lennie was caught hiding a dead mouse in his pocket so he could pet it, the rest of the story had nothing that you could associate with rodents. So I looked up the internet on the background of the book a little bit. Apparently, the author Mr Steinbeck took the title from Robert Burn's poem, To a Mouse which is often quoted as: "The best-laid plans of mice and men go oft awry." He had originally intended to title the book Something That Happened. Burns's poem tells of the regret the narrator feels for having destroyed the home of a mouse while plowing his field; it suggests that no plan is fool-proof and no one can be completely prepared for the future, which pretty much describes the outcome of the story.

A good read.