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duffypratt 's review for:
Our Mutual Friend
by Charles Dickens
Not quite as good as Little Dorritt or Bleak House, but very much in the same vein, and I liked this one way more than Barnaby Rudge, or Dombey and Son, or The Old Curiosity Shop. It's Dickens at very close to his best: heavy handed, overblown, and brilliant.
We start by following a father and daughter who make their living by fishing dead bodies out of the Thames and robbing them. The father, mind you, has principles. He only robs the dead, and would never think of robbing the living. For a while, at least, its open to doubt whether he would hasten people into the state where they would become robbable. And these are some of the better people in this book.
The main plot revolves around the will of a rich man who somehow has made his fortune by creating mountains of dust. The image of these dust mountains is both silly and tremendous, and it quite literally looms over much of the book.
The cast of characters is as vast, and as shallow, as ever. What can you expect with characters with names like Veneering? But I don't read Dickens for his characters. They are always paper thin. He doesn't write about real people, so much as he creates elaborate, and fun, Punch and Judy skits.
To a certain extent, this book is supposed to be about the corrupting tendencies of wealth. But he can't bear to have his characters be anything other than black or white. The ones who are bad and seeking for wealth, are always that way. And the good folks tend to be ever so good. And even when he makes it seem like there is a real change in character, it turns out just to be a sham, with two exceptions. One is the purification of Bella, and the other is with the best character in the book, Jenny Wren. She is a nearly crippled woman, with an alcoholic father. She makes her living by making doll's clothes for rich people, and she is acerbic, witty, and about the fullest and best character that Dickens ever wrote.
The plotting here is better than in most Dickens. The coincidences and absurdities are there, but they are nowhere nearly as annoying as in some other books. It doesn't turn out that everyone is related to everyone else. And the coincidences seem more to get things moving here, instead of in other books, like Oliver Twist, where they seem to conveniently resolve everything.
I only have one more Dickens left - his first, Sketches by Boz. Who knows if I will ever get around to it. I'm glad I saved this one up, but I think I need to do more re-reading of good stuff, than completing an author's work merely for the sake of completion. So, given the choice, would I rather read that, or re-read Great Expectations or David Copperfield. Seems easy when I put it like that, but somehow I know I will end up reading the book I'm pretty sure will be a chore.
We start by following a father and daughter who make their living by fishing dead bodies out of the Thames and robbing them. The father, mind you, has principles. He only robs the dead, and would never think of robbing the living. For a while, at least, its open to doubt whether he would hasten people into the state where they would become robbable. And these are some of the better people in this book.
The main plot revolves around the will of a rich man who somehow has made his fortune by creating mountains of dust. The image of these dust mountains is both silly and tremendous, and it quite literally looms over much of the book.
The cast of characters is as vast, and as shallow, as ever. What can you expect with characters with names like Veneering? But I don't read Dickens for his characters. They are always paper thin. He doesn't write about real people, so much as he creates elaborate, and fun, Punch and Judy skits.
To a certain extent, this book is supposed to be about the corrupting tendencies of wealth. But he can't bear to have his characters be anything other than black or white. The ones who are bad and seeking for wealth, are always that way. And the good folks tend to be ever so good. And even when he makes it seem like there is a real change in character, it turns out just to be a sham, with two exceptions. One is the purification of Bella, and the other is with the best character in the book, Jenny Wren. She is a nearly crippled woman, with an alcoholic father. She makes her living by making doll's clothes for rich people, and she is acerbic, witty, and about the fullest and best character that Dickens ever wrote.
The plotting here is better than in most Dickens. The coincidences and absurdities are there, but they are nowhere nearly as annoying as in some other books. It doesn't turn out that everyone is related to everyone else. And the coincidences seem more to get things moving here, instead of in other books, like Oliver Twist, where they seem to conveniently resolve everything.
I only have one more Dickens left - his first, Sketches by Boz. Who knows if I will ever get around to it. I'm glad I saved this one up, but I think I need to do more re-reading of good stuff, than completing an author's work merely for the sake of completion. So, given the choice, would I rather read that, or re-read Great Expectations or David Copperfield. Seems easy when I put it like that, but somehow I know I will end up reading the book I'm pretty sure will be a chore.