Dickens

Great Expectations

This is the second Dickens novel I've read, A Tale of Two Cities being the first. The novel was well-polished and fun to read. An awful lot of coincidences, which detracted from the novel's believability, but I didn't really mind since the story was so interesting. I was familiar with much of the plot ahead of time, which allowed me to concentrate on the novel's style and structure. (I think I mentioned in an earlier blog--due to a comment made by fellow literatus Michael Berry--that I seem to focus more on the stylistic and structural elements of a novel than on character or theme.) Although the coincidences were off-putting at times and the novel as a whole had a melodramatic tone, I was able to get past those elements and immerse myself in the language. It was a beautifully-written piece of work: the descriptions, the point of view, the narrative, all were varied yet all flowed seamlessly. I enjoyed reading it more than A Tale of Two Cities, although the latter is a more significant work. (I also read Cities several years ago, so my memory is a bit hazy.)


Oliver Twist

Part of me didn't want to jump into another Dickens novel right away. Two Nineteenth-century novels in a row is kind of like eating at two buffets in one day: a lot of substance, a lot of chewing. I'm glad I did, though. My basis of comparison is much clearer than it had been with A Tale of Two Cities. I can confidently say that Oliver Twist was my least favorite of the three. The prose was slightly more dense, it was much more maudlin, and I didn't care for the sarcasm that pervaded the text. I mean, it was constant. So much so that it became annoying. The title character was surprisingly absent through much of the story, which was okay with me since I didn't care for him in the slightest: The kid was annoyingly pure and incorruptible.  The only part of the story in which he appealed to me was when he actually fought back against Noah Claypole near the beginning. Despite that single scene, Oliver was the least interesting of all the characters. This book also had numerous coincidences--a hallmark of Dickens, apparently--but they seemed to work less well for me than they did in Great Expectations, though this may only be due to the fact that I had endured so many of them and their prevalence in the other works of Dickens made me particularly attentive to them as I read. I didn't know much about the novel, but I was able to predict much of it because of this. I could tell from the less-confident prose and overly-complex conclusion that this was an earlier Dickens. It was okay, but I won't read it again.