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A review by chris_chester
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
5.0
Like most in the English speaking world, my introduction to Dickens was some amalgamation of pop culture adaptations of A Christmas Carol and a forced reading of Great Expectations at the barrel of a gun. (Why on earth do English teachers make students read Great Expectations? Because it's a "coming of age" story? Because they see themselves as Miss Havisham?)
For years, I've been operating under the assumption that I didn't like the man's works, and that his popularity must have been the product of 19th century boredom. (They didn't have video games back then, after all, what could possibly have occupied their attention? QED)
Like so many conclusions set upon in youth, I was very, very wrong.
Having swam through an ocean of modernism and out the unpleasant end of postmodern fiction, it's just so refreshing to find myself inhabiting a story told with earnestness and humor and that comes to a satisfying, though still pleasantly ambiguous, conclusion.
In the early part of the book, I was swept up by the Defarges and the Revolutionary fervor. Indeed, Madame Defarge is probably my favorite character in the novel. By the time I came upon the far far better thing, my sympathies had naturally swung in the other direction.
That might be the most impressive thing about the book, to me. That Dickens, as the inveterate Victorian Englishman, could portray the circumstances of the French Revolution so sympathetically while at the same time conveying the horrors and excesses of the Reign of Terror.
The notion that the "long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old" suffer the same fate before calm can be seen is much more realistic than it is romantic or perhaps monarchist.
But through Carton, the reader is left with the reminder that if humanity doesn't learn its lesson from this episode, the same horrors could be visited again.
"Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind."
In a world where the institutions of industry and public governance are seeking to tighten their grip on the global population even as those selfsame institutions crumble under the burden of a declining resource base, we would all do well to remember that lesson.
For years, I've been operating under the assumption that I didn't like the man's works, and that his popularity must have been the product of 19th century boredom. (They didn't have video games back then, after all, what could possibly have occupied their attention? QED)
Like so many conclusions set upon in youth, I was very, very wrong.
Having swam through an ocean of modernism and out the unpleasant end of postmodern fiction, it's just so refreshing to find myself inhabiting a story told with earnestness and humor and that comes to a satisfying, though still pleasantly ambiguous, conclusion.
In the early part of the book, I was swept up by the Defarges and the Revolutionary fervor. Indeed, Madame Defarge is probably my favorite character in the novel. By the time I came upon the far far better thing, my sympathies had naturally swung in the other direction.
That might be the most impressive thing about the book, to me. That Dickens, as the inveterate Victorian Englishman, could portray the circumstances of the French Revolution so sympathetically while at the same time conveying the horrors and excesses of the Reign of Terror.
The notion that the "long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old" suffer the same fate before calm can be seen is much more realistic than it is romantic or perhaps monarchist.
But through Carton, the reader is left with the reminder that if humanity doesn't learn its lesson from this episode, the same horrors could be visited again.
"Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind."
In a world where the institutions of industry and public governance are seeking to tighten their grip on the global population even as those selfsame institutions crumble under the burden of a declining resource base, we would all do well to remember that lesson.