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4.02 AVERAGE
4.02 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Dickens was a master storyteller, so I apologize to his shade for the 4⭐️ rating. But I dislike the fairy tale ending. The story ends exactly as "King Grisly Beard" does, with the spoiled shrewish girl learning respect for her husband through adversity and hard work. (The husband, already perfectly moral and manly, has nothing to learn. A little symmetry here might have been nice. I ground my teeth over Mary Graham's loyalty to the feckless Martin, too. Couldn't both partners have something to learn? I can't think of a Dickens example of both partners needing to learn and change, except perhaps Dick Swiveller & the Marchioness.)
Bella is one of the few Dickens heroines you could remotely describe as "spunky," and the author is careful to make sure she's a grateful little bright-eyed adoring angel-of-the-house by the end. I know, I know...my favorite, Esther Summerson, is even sweeter and more self-sacrificing than Bella becomes. But I think the world of Bleak House is wider, deeper, more dangerous and bitter, and ultimately more satisfying, than the world of Our Mutual Friend. Bella's life, with her handsome, adoring husband, her adorable healthy baby, her 150 pounds a year, and her little furnished cottage was already a pretty damn satisfying complete life. Adding in untold wealth was just the icing on the cake. Esther SUFFERED.
I will add, though...this is my third? fourth? complete reading of the book, and I'm pleasantly surprised each time to discover that Dickens does not excuse Bradley Headstone's obsessive behavior. Even in the year 2016, stalkers and abusers are so often excused. "She was so beautiful." "He was so in love with her, you can see why he did what he did." Good on you, Mr. Dickens.
Bella is one of the few Dickens heroines you could remotely describe as "spunky," and the author is careful to make sure she's a grateful little bright-eyed adoring angel-of-the-house by the end. I know, I know...my favorite, Esther Summerson, is even sweeter and more self-sacrificing than Bella becomes. But I think the world of Bleak House is wider, deeper, more dangerous and bitter, and ultimately more satisfying, than the world of Our Mutual Friend. Bella's life, with her handsome, adoring husband, her adorable healthy baby, her 150 pounds a year, and her little furnished cottage was already a pretty damn satisfying complete life. Adding in untold wealth was just the icing on the cake. Esther SUFFERED.
I will add, though...this is my third? fourth? complete reading of the book, and I'm pleasantly surprised each time to discover that Dickens does not excuse Bradley Headstone's obsessive behavior. Even in the year 2016, stalkers and abusers are so often excused. "She was so beautiful." "He was so in love with her, you can see why he did what he did." Good on you, Mr. Dickens.
Very long, and slightly hard-going at first as it starts with the Veneerings who are the dullest characters in the book, but by the end, despite its romanticised ending I was quite charmed by it, particularly the attachment of Bella and John
slow-paced
I could really only muster two stars for this one. Normally I enjoy reading Dickens, but this felt like Dickens in a blender to me. It seemed like he was just recycling concepts that he had used before: the pure young woman of lowly birth with a heart of gold, the old miser, the shifty villain, the Tiny Tim like character who is disabled. They were almost archetypes of archetypal Dickens characters. The plot didn't grab me, and overall I just felt like there wasn't a clear focus. It starts out strong, and there's some wonderfully atmospheric prose and a few interesting plot twists, but definitely not my favorite Dickens.
funny
relaxing
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
A guest on the History of Literature podcast chose “Our Mutual Friend” as the hypothetical last book he’d like to (re)read before dying. Hearing his description, I decided I’d come back to Dickens.
From whom else do we get such delightful phrases as “all the jobbers who job in all the jobberies jobbed”? Dickens’ language is wonderfully entertaining, and I did keep wondering how things would turn out through much of the book.
But I didn’t love the story, several characters were too perfect, it was sooo long, and for me, the twist at the end kind of ruined it. I guess I’d give this 3.5 stars—it’s a good book, but I didn’t love the story.
My favorite character was the lawyer, Mortimer Lightwood. I like how he comforts a humble client who is distressed after inheriting a chunk of change.
“‘Speaking now,’ returned Mortimer, ‘with the irresponsible imbecility of a private individual, and not with the profundity of a professional adviser, I should say that if the circumstance of its being too much, weighs upon your mind, you have the haven of consolation open to you that you can easily make it less. And if you should be apprehensive of the trouble of doing so, there is the further haven of consolation that any number of people will take the trouble off your hands.’” (Book 1, Chapter 8).
I listened to the audiobook; Simon Vance did an excellent job.
The Colombian writer Alvaro Mutis once said: "A real influence is an author who communicates an energy and a great desire to tell a story...it isn't that you want to write like Dickens, but rather that when you read Dickens, you feel an imaginative energy which you use to your own ends. Dickens has an extraordinary imagination for situations, characters, places, corners."
Our Mutual Friend was the last book Dickens completed, and like all his later works it is voluminous and complex, full of deep, dark mysterious doings, murder and secret identity, saccharine romance, cutting caricatures of high society buffoons, and tender portraits of society's unfortunates. It's my feeling that the situations, characters, places, and corners are not quite as perfectly plotted and executed here as in his very best work (Great Expectations and Bleak House). There are too many loose threads, too many improbabilities (even by Dickensian standards), and not enough of the magnificent prose that characterizes the omniscient sections of Bleak House. Nevertheless, it probably ranks just below those, and some would argue that it IS his best. He brings it home, as always, with a cleverness that makes him look really smart, which he obviously enjoys. For me, it's a chance to be absorbed in his foggy, soggy, crooked London streets, from high-toned Portland Place to the riverside tavern of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters and its coterie of "Waterside characters," and I'll always take that chance.
The primary mechanism by which this novel moves is transfiguration; between identities, between roles, between genders, and especially between life and death. Nearly every character at some point finds themselves in a purgatory, with one foot on either side. I can't say anything, really, about the shifting identities without spoiling some of the plot twists, so I won't. I can, however, point out how Jenny Wren refers to her worse-than-useless father as "her child," and the kindly old Mr. Riah as her "godmother." I can point out how Mr. Twemlow, grabbed and shaken by Mrs. Lammle, "finds himself at such a disadvantage that he would like to be of the opposite gender." And there are countless occasions when a character lingers between life and death, or views themselves as both alive and dead, or deliberately kills and buries a part of themselves. Often they return, sometimes they don't. Either way, they are never the same.
In his brilliant horror novel Drood, Dan Simmons supposes that the Staplehurst train disaster, which occurred during the writing of Our Mutual Friend, sent Dickens off on a bizarre double life of cults, crypts, and bitchy catfights with Wilkie Collins. There's no doubt Dickens was shaken to the core by the incident, and while he probably wasn't under the sway of an Egyptian sorcerer, he exhibits an interest in shedding old lives, or having them taken from you.
Whatever you make of that, Dickens did have an extraordinary imaginative drive to the very end, even if it was no longer firing on every single one of the 16 formidable cylinders it was capable of. He concludes OMF with a hilarious dinner party at the Veneerings (who, overall, have virtually nothing to do with the plot and are pretty much boring and irritating - this is by far their best scene), and a postscript in which he addresses Staplehurst directly: "I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book:--THE END."
You can hear all of his personality in that line. There's an expression of intimacy with his readers that is sincere, condescending, and self-congratulatory all at once. He almost wants to phrase it that "his public can never be nearer to being deprived of him," but is a little too self-aware, and a little too genuinely affectionate toward them. What I will say for him is that there's no hint of using near-death as an excuse to take a few years off. Such a thing would have been unthinkable. Nevermind that he had made his fortune and was established as England's greatest celebrity. The imaginative energy had its own ends, and would never allow it. That energy was the master, the real-life version of Simmons' nefarious Drood, and Charles Dickens was never really anything more than its servant.
Our Mutual Friend was the last book Dickens completed, and like all his later works it is voluminous and complex, full of deep, dark mysterious doings, murder and secret identity, saccharine romance, cutting caricatures of high society buffoons, and tender portraits of society's unfortunates. It's my feeling that the situations, characters, places, and corners are not quite as perfectly plotted and executed here as in his very best work (Great Expectations and Bleak House). There are too many loose threads, too many improbabilities (even by Dickensian standards), and not enough of the magnificent prose that characterizes the omniscient sections of Bleak House. Nevertheless, it probably ranks just below those, and some would argue that it IS his best. He brings it home, as always, with a cleverness that makes him look really smart, which he obviously enjoys. For me, it's a chance to be absorbed in his foggy, soggy, crooked London streets, from high-toned Portland Place to the riverside tavern of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters and its coterie of "Waterside characters," and I'll always take that chance.
The primary mechanism by which this novel moves is transfiguration; between identities, between roles, between genders, and especially between life and death. Nearly every character at some point finds themselves in a purgatory, with one foot on either side. I can't say anything, really, about the shifting identities without spoiling some of the plot twists, so I won't. I can, however, point out how Jenny Wren refers to her worse-than-useless father as "her child," and the kindly old Mr. Riah as her "godmother." I can point out how Mr. Twemlow, grabbed and shaken by Mrs. Lammle, "finds himself at such a disadvantage that he would like to be of the opposite gender." And there are countless occasions when a character lingers between life and death, or views themselves as both alive and dead, or deliberately kills and buries a part of themselves. Often they return, sometimes they don't. Either way, they are never the same.
In his brilliant horror novel Drood, Dan Simmons supposes that the Staplehurst train disaster, which occurred during the writing of Our Mutual Friend, sent Dickens off on a bizarre double life of cults, crypts, and bitchy catfights with Wilkie Collins. There's no doubt Dickens was shaken to the core by the incident, and while he probably wasn't under the sway of an Egyptian sorcerer, he exhibits an interest in shedding old lives, or having them taken from you.
Whatever you make of that, Dickens did have an extraordinary imaginative drive to the very end, even if it was no longer firing on every single one of the 16 formidable cylinders it was capable of. He concludes OMF with a hilarious dinner party at the Veneerings (who, overall, have virtually nothing to do with the plot and are pretty much boring and irritating - this is by far their best scene), and a postscript in which he addresses Staplehurst directly: "I can never be much nearer parting company with my readers for ever than I was then, until there shall be written against my life, the two words with which I have this day closed this book:--THE END."
You can hear all of his personality in that line. There's an expression of intimacy with his readers that is sincere, condescending, and self-congratulatory all at once. He almost wants to phrase it that "his public can never be nearer to being deprived of him," but is a little too self-aware, and a little too genuinely affectionate toward them. What I will say for him is that there's no hint of using near-death as an excuse to take a few years off. Such a thing would have been unthinkable. Nevermind that he had made his fortune and was established as England's greatest celebrity. The imaginative energy had its own ends, and would never allow it. That energy was the master, the real-life version of Simmons' nefarious Drood, and Charles Dickens was never really anything more than its servant.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
A tapestry of characters, saturated and tightly woven.
Obviously it's great, it's Dickens. Satire and humour, social commentary, human sentiment, it's got it all. Vivacious description, atmosphere and florid prose all present and correct.
That's the thing about it. It's a latter career piece, a distillation of so much he had previously done. It's almost to the point that the characters, turns of phrase, situations even the ideas are tropes. They're not, they are the creative of a master, but we have seen them before
That's the thing about it. It's a latter career piece, a distillation of so much he had previously done. It's almost to the point that the characters, turns of phrase, situations even the ideas are tropes. They're not, they are the creative of a master, but we have seen them before
This is definitely not my favourite Dickens novel but I was invested in Bella's storyline and enjoyed the way Dickens ridiculed the frivolous salon societies of the Victorian age.