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Title: Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, Joel J. Brattin, Michael Slater, Marcus Stone, A. Boyd Houghton ISBN: 0460882171 Publisher: Tuttle Publishing Pub. Date: 01 March, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.43
Rating: 5
Summary: Dickens' finest (and most "Modern") novel.
Comment: Elusive in a good way, of course. Our Mutual Friend, his last novel, shows some decidedly modernist techniques and situations that were very much ahead of their time. This novel would have been at home if written in, say, the early twentieth century. The twin images of the River and of Garbage (not just decay and dust, but also recycling and renewal) permeate the beginning of this book, and carry through with characters that don't fall into easy categories. All of the requisite Dickensian elements are here, but the reader is also presented with an ending that is both an epiphany and a recognition that the story REALLY doesn't end, after all; storytellers just move onto different subjects. In other words, there isn't the neat bow at the end of the novel that is so prevalent in Victorian literature--one more reason this novel remains somewhat apart from Dickens' other works, while at the same time being a fresh, engaging read. Probably not the best work to begin with, if you're new to Dickens, but if you have the rhythm of his prose down from other, shorter works, you'll certainly enjoy the greater complexities of Our Mutual Friend.
Rating: 2
Summary: Dickensian Quagmire
Comment: "Our Mutual Friend" is the last of Dickens's completed novels, and apart from "The Mystery of Edwin Drood", the only one of his novels I had hitherto not read. The more I've read Dickens, the less impressed I've been. Before I began "Our Mutual Friend", I thought that "Little Dorrit" was his worst, but I'm afraid "Our Mutual Friend" now takes the top spot in my list of Dickensian horrors.
It's not the length of the novel that's the problem (it being of average length for Dickens's larger works), nor the usual limitations of the author's writing style (the utterly unconvincing portrayal of female characters, the grindingly forced humour, the welter of two-dimensional characters, the inevitable surfeit of padding by an author writing to quota), rather I felt that Dickens was guilty of one of two fatal errors. Either he was over-ambitious in trying to develop simultaneously, and with the same importance, several plots within the novel, or he was incapable of deciding which plot and which set of characters should be the main driving force of the novel.
That's a pity, because "Our Mutual Friend" starts off well: a night scene on the Thames, a drowned man, a mystery concerning an inheritance. Unfortunately, I soon became bogged down in a lattice work of characters as Dickens skipped from one plot to another, failing convincingly to develop those plots and the characters in them.
There are interesting themes in the book - a febrile economy based on stock market speculation, a glut of rapacious lawyers, the contrast of private wealth with public squalor - 140 years later, has England changed that much? But such interesting social criticism died quickly, along with my interest in this book.
G Rodgers
Rating: 4
Summary: underappreciated
Comment: An interesting assumption undergirds George Orwell's fascinating essay on Charles Dickens, that everyone reading his essay will have read and remembered nearly every word and certainly every character of Dickens. Once upon a time, this was likely true. We're all familiar with the story of eager readers waiting at the dock to greet the ocean liners that were bringing the next installment of Great Expectations. If memory serves, it is also a book by Dickens that the womenfolk read aloud to themselves in Gone With the Wind, while the men are out on their first Klan raid. It was undoubtedly the case, particularly when the art form of novel was itself young, that everyone used to read all of Dickens enormous oeuvre. Today though, I doubt whether many of us get past about four or five of his most popular works: A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. At least, I know I've got about five others sitting on a shelf collecting dust, their daunting size defeating my mild wish to have read them. But recently PBS ran a Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Our Mutual Friend and it was terrific, which proved sufficient motivation to read it too.
In barest outline, John Harmon is the heir to a junkman's fortune. But his father conditioned the inheritance on his marrying a young woman, Bella Wilfer, whom the elder Harmon had once met in the park when she was a mere child. Harmon rebels at the notion, for her sake as much as his own, and when fortune presents him with the opportunity to stage his own death, he takes it. A corpse, later identified as Harmon, is found floating in the Thames by Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie, whose trade it is to loot such bodies. With John's "death," the fortune reverts to Nicodemus Boffin, who had been an assistant at the junkyard. Boffin and his wife bring Bella to live with them, in hopes of alleviating her disappointment at not receiving the fortune. The avaricious Bella is indeed determined to marry money and so has little inclination, at first, to humor the affections of John Rokesmith, the mysterious young man (and eponymous Mutual Friend) who comes to work as Boffin's personal assistant.
Meanwhile, while Gaffer Hexam has a falling out with his old partner Rogue Riderhood, Lizzie gets her bright but selfish young brother into a school, where his teacher Bradley Headstone develops an unhealthy love for Lizzie. She is also being pursued by the young lawyer Eugene Wrayburn, despite the obvious difference in their social stations.
While the first story line features the moral development of Bella and the growing love between her and John Harmon/Rokesmith, the second soon degenerates.... Beyond the two basic plots, the book is completely overstuffed--with ridiculous coincidences and impossible happenings; with characters who are little more than caricatures, some too virtuous, some too malevolent; with subplots that peter out and go nowhere. Running it's course throughout the story, like a liquid leitmotif, is the River Thames and brooding over it are the enormous piles of "dust," the garbage on which the Harmon fortune is founded. It all gets to be a bit much, but it's also really refreshing to see the great novelist at work.
This is what Tom Wolfe meant when he urged modern authors to get out and look around and write about what they found, instead of penning the increasingly insular and psychological novels which have become the staple of modern fiction. Dickens got the idea for the body fished from the water by seeing rivermen at work, for Charlie Hexam after seeing such a bright young boy with his father. The "dust" piles were in fact a real source of wealth, in a society where the refuse of the well to do could be used again by the poor. If Dickens writing is ultimately too broad for us to think of the book as realistic, it at least attempts to capture the flavor (or the stench) of a time and a place and it is animated by the society that teemed around him. If Dickens ultimately seems to have tried to do too much, better a novel like this where the author's reach exceeds his grasp than to settle for one where the author ventures little. Sure it could stand to lose a couple hundred pages, a few subplots and a dozen or so characters, and it's not up to the standard of his best work (there's a reason after all why we all read the same few books) but it's great fun and, even if just to watch the steady growth of Bella Wilfer and the steady disintegration of Bradley Headstone, well worth reading.
GRADE: B
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Title: Little Dorrit (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens, Stephen Wall, Helen Small ISBN: 0140434925 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Dombey and Son (Penguin English Library) by Charles Dickens, Peter Fairclough, Raymond Williams ISBN: 0140430482 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: June, 1970 List Price(USD): $8.95 |
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Title: Bleak House (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens, Nicola Bradbury, Hablot K. Browne ISBN: 0140434968 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: January, 1997 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The Old Curiosity Shop (Everyman Paperback Classics) by Charles Dickens, Paul Schlicke ISBN: 0460876007 Publisher: Everyman Paperback Classics List Price(USD): $6.95 |
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Title: Nicholas Nickleby (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens, Mark Ford, Hablot K. Browne ISBN: 0140435123 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: November, 1999 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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