Because it's always good to have a dissenting view
|
I've been a big fan of Dickens since reading David Copperfield about six years ago. Bleak House, which was the immediate follow-up to Copperfield, is not one of his best books.
Firstly, what happened to Dickens sense of humour, which went AWOL in Bleak House? There are some half-hearted attempts at comedy but they mostly fall flat. In fact, Dickens never really recovered as a comic writer after this, and his later works, though notable for many merits, are not particularly amusing, with exceptions. The warmth present in the best passages of Copperfield is also missing, though Dickens' notorious sentimentality is rampant.
Half of the book is narrated by Esther, who is more given to protestations of humility than Uriah Heep himself, except we are supposed to accept Esther as sincere, unlike the villanous Heep. Dickens' portrayal of young maidenhood has often been lampooned, and Esther is possibly the nadir, the worst of the worst. The scenes between Esther and her "love" Ada make for queasy reading, for me at least. The part that is not narrated by Esther is told in the present tense, for some reason, and the prose is very stilted and unnatural, and Dickens' characteristic facetiousness and lightness of touch cannot be attained.
There are a few mildly interesting minor characters in the book, such as Harold Skimpole, but none of the main characters are more than cardboard cutouts. The overall impression I got from this book was that Dickens' heart wasn't in it in the same way as in Copperfield or Great Expectations. The current critical vogue this book enjoys is probably down to its dealing with BIG SOCIAL ISSUES, and the fact that it is more carefully plotted than other Dickens novels, but the casual reader should not introduce himself to Dickens via this plodding and uninvolving work, it could put you off Dickens for life. Check out David Copperfield or Great Expectations instead.
I also felt that, contrary to popular opinion, the recent BBC adaptation was boring and incoherent.
|
|
unbeatable
|
|
pretty unbeatable, touching, heart breaking, wickedly funny and extremely evocative of Dicken's London...if you just read one classic novel then make it this one. A masterpiece
|
|
|
One of the six truly great Dickens novels
|
|
Superb panorama of Victorian life, exposing the state, the legal system, the poverty of riches and the hypcrisy of liberalism (Horace Skimpole). Inspiring - the TV series brought it home to millions of people that Dickens really is our finest novelist.
|
|
|
the Wonder of Bleak House !
|
'Fog everywhere. Fog up the river...fog down the river...chance people on the bridges...with fog all round them.'
Repetition breeds a delicious sensory pleasure. This is Dickens's incantatory requiem to visual perception. Indeed our perceptions of the real are under review. This marked investment in temporary blindness is a metaphor for the secrecy and moral misjudgement that contaminates the novel on all levels. For Bleak House is a labyrinthine novel which attempts to conceal as much as to reveal; a novel peopled by isolated, lost individuals, clinging to their secrets and stories buried deep beneath the complex narrative web that is Bleak House.
Everything stands for something else in Bleak House, nothing is ever just itself. Dickens's use of the dual narrative, with the seeming transcendence of the third person narrator set against the apologetic observations of Dickens's only female narrator, Esther Summerson, engenders displacement at every turn. For this split responsibility for disclosure serves to protect the innocence of Esther as mid-Victorian heroine, whilst also tantalising the reader with hints at erotic passions that lie way beyond the permitted script of the upstanding Victorian novel.
Every reader will have their favourite moments in Bleak House for it is a truly gorgeous novel. My personal favourite was revealed to me years ago in a letter from Steve Newman my most inspiring tutor at Liverpool University , and it has never been supplanted in my affections:
'For I don't,' says Jo,'I don't know nothink.'
It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and the corner of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postman deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language-to be every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!'
This must be one of the most Romantic moments in fiction. The sense of wonder grants the street boy Jo a temporary human story that his abject inhuman poverty precludes elsewhere. Not knowing is rescued from ignorance and becomes a creative 'other' experience, where the narrator revisits the known and retranslates it from Jo's point of view.
The lostness of Jo in terms of his illiteracy becomes a metaphor for the novel's own search for significance. For everyone is lonely in Bleak House. Everyone in Bleak House is lost. Everyone is attempting to decipher something, or someone, or somewhere, and these imperatives destroy as much as heal.
Dickens repeatedly employs the infinitive in this passage and in doing so creates an overriding sense of separation and even suspension. Seeing is not believing, it is bewildered incomprehension. Like Pip in Great Expectations when he gazes at Miss Havisham still dressed in her ancient wedding gown, Jo's encounter with the world involves stasis and fear. Jo's impotence in the world is represented through this deployment of the infinitive, rendering the finite a place way beyond the scope of Jo's destiny.
Wonderful!
|
|
|
Brilliant!
|
How to describe the story? I leave to better reviewers than I. A long and complicated tale about a dispute over a will and a family inheritance that destroys most of the litigants, either to madness or death, leaving it all to the bloodsucking attorneys.
There are many many unusual characters in the book and you have to pay close attention (or better yet, keep notes), as in the end the author brings everything full circle and not a character is wasted, and ends up playing a part in the tale. It's just amazing how Dickens slowly tells his story, like peeling an onion. Layer after layer is slowly revealed one after another until it all pulls together in the end. I haven't seen another author do this quite as good since reading Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (unabridged version of course).
Definitely one not to be missed, and I would hope it's required reading at law school, but I seriously doubt that.
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada