Books
And roughly a thousand pages later, Bleak House goes back on the shelf.
I guess my main Dickens fondness is for David Copperfield, which I’ve read the most times. But Bleak House is a better book by far, and could easily be Dickens’ best. (Of course, Our Mutual Friend is up there too, so it’s probably a pointless exercise to attempt to pick and choose.) As I noted a while back, I was listening to Miriam Margolyes' reading of it, which is excellent, but at skatey-eight million hours I needed to pick up the audiobook pace, so I picked up the book in my home library and proceeded to read it for myself. I didn’t recall that much about it from when I first read it maybe fifty years ago. The famous line “I saw my mother…” of course, and Esther’s disfigurement (I doubt if that’s a spoiler because something tells me you’re not going to go out and read it just because your reading my take on it). I remember thinking that, like most of Dickens’ heroines, she deserved getting the pox just to knock her off her oh-so-perfect high horse, but still, she is a sympathetic character in the end, when she starts having less than nice thoughts about everybody. She does indeed change over the span of the book; not a lot, mind you—I mean, she’s always going to heaven on the first express leaving the cemetery—but she does grow up.
Anyhow, two things that are interesting aside from the plot. First of all, half of it is written in the first person, Esther’s narrative, and half in the omniscient third person. Dickens of course wrote other books in one or the other, but I think this is his only mix and match. And it may be one of the first mix-and-matches ever: if not, it’s close. As a general rule, I don’t like this approach. In contemporary books it always seems like a cheat, as if the author couldn’t figure out how to do the job one way or the other so it ends up just stitched together as both. When I was reading James Patterson books for the Day Job it seemed like he pumped one of these out a month with some co-writer or other, and they all had this lazy approach. Usually the first person was some sort of psychopath and the third person the good guys hunting them down. But then again, Patterson sold enough books to make the Bible jealous, and Dickens at the very least had done it first, so who was I to judge? (Actually, I was the guy who picked the Day Job books, so I guess that’s who I was to judge, come to think of it.)
The other thing is one I don’t remember noting first time around, that the first person narrative is in the past tense and the third person is in the present tense. Present tense writing can be annoying, as we are mostly used to past tense, and it comes across in modern books as an author being consciously arty. (It was almost an instant NO in the Day Job.) And somehow Dickens pulls it off without a hitch. Then again, Dickens is Dickens and most everybody else isn’t, so that may explain it.
So Bleak House becomes a lot of things. First and foremost it is a big book bursting with characters and narrative, and it’s one of the best by one of the best authors of all time, so while it may take a bit of one’s energy to get through it, it is time well-spent. It’s a damned good read. But on top of that, if you take just one step further, it’s a bit of a marvel in the complexity of storytelling using different narrative voices from different time perspectives, the happening-now third person and the looking-back first person. And, oh yeah, it’s a man writing as a woman in that first person. (The issue of Dickens women is way too deep for this post—or probably any of my posts—so we’ll leave that alone.) The whole thing is, in a word, a marvel. One of the great shames of modern education is that high schools have no idea how to set students up for Dickens. He is ultimately delivered as an author to be avoided at all costs. If they assign Great Expectations they allow that showing a movie version is the best way to grasp it. This is like thinking the best way to teach Van Gogh is to describe his work in rhyming couplets. Or they assign A Tale of Two Cities, the other hardy HS perennial, which is at one of the furthest edges of typical Dickens (he only wrote two historical) and on top of that has virtually no fun in it. Which is why, if I had to recommend Dickens to a teenager, it would be David Copperfield. It’s often funny, it’s engaging, it has great characters, a good story, and it’s maybe among the least amount of work for a great book. But to be honest, I wouldn’t recommend Dickens, or a whole lot of other great books, to high school students. My goal would be to make readers out of them, not make people who watched the VHS movie version of Great Expectations in the classroom out of them, or worse, Dickens haters by default. High schools should, for the most part, teach short, snappy books that kids will enjoy reading. (Which, by the way, categorically does NOT include Ethan Frome, which may be short but which no teenager has ever understood since the day old Edith put the pen down.) Science fiction, mysteries, enjoyable stuff they can actually read as part of their workload. I remember once having some fun with debate colleagues putting together a list of books for teens that they would actually enjoy and which might kindle a love of reading. But, of course, debate people tend to be interested in real education. Sadly, there’s way too little of this to go around.
Meanwhile, who knows, I may never read another Dickens book again. And then again I might. One never knows, does one.
