Charlie Cox discusses how each character in Maugham's The Razor's Edge gets what they want, but at different costs. The novel asks whether their compromises were worth it, forcing readers to judge the price of success.
What's very clever about the book is, and I think he actually says this at the end, at the very end, that everyone actually in the end gets what they want. They all end up, you know, to greater or less degrees, they end up getting what they want. And then therefore it's kind of the reader's job to decide how well that worked out for them and were the means did the means of achieving the things they want— were the compromises worth it?
