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ben_miller 's review for:
Our Mutual Friend
by Charles Dickens
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.