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artemistics 's review for:
A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
dark
emotional
slow-paced
despite this being my first time approaching dickens' work (millions of christmas carol adaptations aside), i fear i was deeply familiar with the entire plot of a tale of two cities since i was 13 years old and i devoured cassandra clare's the infernal devices trilogy like an insane person. yes, really. but still, i was ready to get wrapped up in dickens' epic melodrama about the french revolution and particularly the reign of terror, which happen to make up for the most interesting parts of the story. whenever the narrative jumped to a paris chapter i became fully invested, but my excitement for those chapters also speaks for the fact that ... my god, were the london chapters boring! i definitely didn't want to be the person that only became interested in the story when sydney carton was on page, but dickens sure made it hard not to be. and, unfortunately, carton's absence during most of the second book is an unavoidable, awkward, alcoholic-lawyer-shaped hole right in the middle of the plot, even more noticeable in the one or two chapters centered around carton that are just so good and engaging you just keep waiting for him to show up again, but, in a terrible loop, are constantly disappointed to discover he's actuallly doing some other stuff, over to the left, outside of the manette home.
narrative aside, i also had some issues with the depictions of both lucie and (sad to report) madame defarge. the latter one was particularly disappointing during the final five or so chapters because she'd been such an interesting, alluring character throughout the slow-building plot to the revolution. in the end, lucie and defarge, linked as obvious foils to each other, end up falling to the same fate of flattened female characters; lucie i think is self-explanatory as the perfect victorian girl-woman who is goodness personified and everybody is obsessed with, while defarge is simplified to "senseless extremist" the more the stakes escalate. i sigh imagining a version of this story where lucie and madame are allowed to have rightfully complex feelings about the events around them as well as their feelings on both darnay & each other, brought together and yet separted by similar pains surrounding their families. i understand in theory that both of these characters are presented in this way because they're supposed to represent Things And Concepts, but i do wish they could just represent women, actually, with the grays that come with personhood. maybe that's my fault for having expectations, though.
i don't want to be wholly negative about it, though, because i did enjoy myself. thankfully the story gets a good rhythm going for the third & final book, transcurring exclusively in france, when everything comes together exquisitely for a grand, dramatic final chapter that, frankly, left me choked up, a fact i can't deny no matter how bitter i get when thinking about the treatment of the female characters. dickens' miracle in this book is managing to create such vivid, epic images within this important context but never straying from the fact that this is a story about historically inconsequential people, and somehow, through his writing, these characters' internal worlds and personal dramas manage to measure up to their grandiose backdrop without being swallowed up by it. i won't remember this book because sydney carton claimes he can see paris rising from the ashes after the dark times of the revolution, but i'll remember how i could feel himself accepting his own redemption through his personal sacrifice out of love and honor, the far, far better thing that he does, than he has ever done.
narrative aside, i also had some issues with the depictions of both lucie and (sad to report) madame defarge. the latter one was particularly disappointing during the final five or so chapters because she'd been such an interesting, alluring character throughout the slow-building plot to the revolution. in the end, lucie and defarge, linked as obvious foils to each other, end up falling to the same fate of flattened female characters; lucie i think is self-explanatory as the perfect victorian girl-woman who is goodness personified and everybody is obsessed with, while defarge is simplified to "senseless extremist" the more the stakes escalate. i sigh imagining a version of this story where lucie and madame are allowed to have rightfully complex feelings about the events around them as well as their feelings on both darnay & each other, brought together and yet separted by similar pains surrounding their families. i understand in theory that both of these characters are presented in this way because they're supposed to represent Things And Concepts, but i do wish they could just represent women, actually, with the grays that come with personhood. maybe that's my fault for having expectations, though.
i don't want to be wholly negative about it, though, because i did enjoy myself. thankfully the story gets a good rhythm going for the third & final book, transcurring exclusively in france, when everything comes together exquisitely for a grand, dramatic final chapter that, frankly, left me choked up, a fact i can't deny no matter how bitter i get when thinking about the treatment of the female characters. dickens' miracle in this book is managing to create such vivid, epic images within this important context but never straying from the fact that this is a story about historically inconsequential people, and somehow, through his writing, these characters' internal worlds and personal dramas manage to measure up to their grandiose backdrop without being swallowed up by it. i won't remember this book because sydney carton claimes he can see paris rising from the ashes after the dark times of the revolution, but i'll remember how i could feel himself accepting his own redemption through his personal sacrifice out of love and honor, the far, far better thing that he does, than he has ever done.