I haven't read much Charles Dickens. I read Great Expectations in high school, of course, and I read A Tale of Two Cities during a summer temp job that involved hours and hours of sitting at a desk and occasionally delivering a fax from the fax machine or signing for a UPS delivery.But I feel like not reading Charles Dickens leaves a big hole in my cultural literacy, and so awhile back I paused by the Charles Dickens section of Barnes and Noble, and then on a whim I picked up Bleak House (why that one, I'm really not sure), and then put off reading it because it was 890 pages long and I knew that after picking it up I wouldn't be reading much else for awhile.
I finally started, and then finally finished, all 890 pages, and I really enjoyed it. I think I had this idea in my head that Charles Dickens novels were all about exaggerated characters and the social ills of 19th century London, and Bleak House doesn't fail on that score. But I also found a very real and sympathetic portrayal of individuals. I found the characters (even the exaggerated ones) to be believable and complicated, and even when it was clear that Mr. Dickens was very purposefully twisting our heartstrings, I felt willing to go along with it and let my heartstrings be twisted.
I have a hard time saying what the plot is. In fact, for the entire first half of the book (and keep in mind that half of the book is almost 450 pages) I had no idea that there was a plot. I felt like Bleak House must just be about introducing a whole lot of interesting characters with intertwined lives for the sake of introducing a whole lot of interesting characters with intertwined lives. Obviously these characters were engaging enough to keep me reading for 450 pages, but I hoped that something more was going to come up. And then it did. By the end all of the characters and their stories (except for one small subset comprising a family who, as far as I can tell, appeared in the novel as little more than a social statement and some slight comic relief, but I liked them, and I didn't begrudge them being there) came together slowly and satisfyingly.
Bleak House is a very 19th century novel - the happiness of the happy endings and the tragedy of the tragic endings are all a little too tidy for real life, but the characters and their stories are real enough, and if storytelling always reflected life perfectly, and if fiction didn't somehow still reflect something about real life, we wouldn't tell so many stories.
I liked Bleak House. I would read another Dickens book, though given the length it might be a little while yet :).
1 comment:
Good job! I love Charlie Dickens because even though his books and it's characters are 19th century, they are timeless. I know this one from church, that one from done the street, etc.
Start with the lesser known Dickens books. I like them better than Great Expectations and David Copperfield. Try Pickwick Papers, Hard Times, The Old Curiosity Shop, etc.
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