The Last of Little Dorrit

And finally, finally I finished. Ironic that because Chubs co-opted my iPad to play Plants and Zombies, I was forced to borrow Jackie's leather-bound first edition to finish the book. This was in somewhat better condition than Martin Chuzzlewit and I read it straight through.

I realise I have been unfair to the book. OK, some parts were dreary and Little Dorrit was so good that she got on my nerves sometimes. I could better understand Fanny or Miss Wade or even Tattycoram.

But she got the object of her life which was to serve the man that she loved, raise him on a pedestal, take care of him, sacrifice herself for him. I guess it was a happy ending of sorts.

And the mysteries as they unravelled....after all that build-up, I couldn't feel the actual explanation was something of a let down. And it was not even very clear, when it came to the codicil that Mrs Clennam was supposed to have suppressed. The explanation as to why she didn't burn it and have done with it was poor, insufficient. She justified everything through the hard lens of her assumed religion (death and damnation forever). She could have come up with a suitable justification for burning the paper and thus, not thrusting herself into all this...

As for her suddenly having the energy to get up on her two useless legs and make her way to Marshalsea, I mean, that was utterly ridiculous. But I guess the ridiculousness was not the point, but the force of feeling that impelled it. It's like a Shakesperian play; you're not supposed to logically explain it - it is a play of emotions, the drama of what people are capable of and the stories they tell themselves about it.

Pet disappointed me but I guess her parents were somewhat to blame there - they had spoilt her to such a degree that her insistence of marrying that entirely unsuitable Henry Gowan (one of two characters in the book that didn't get his proper comeuppance, the other being Flintwich) and then suffering through it, cut off from her parents (except in terms of money which he unashamedly took) without a murmur because she loved him too much to credit his faults - it seems that Dickens's conception of a woman who loves is a woman who overlooks and continues to overlook the faults of her beloved. And in his narratives, that is seen as a virtue rather than the crass stupidity it is.

I think that women may go into these relationships blind, but their eyes are gradually opened and when they come to value the idiot they married at his true worth, they either leave him (preferable) or turn against him and make both their lives a living hell. I don't think they continue to meekly love him and excuse his faults.

But after Little Dorrit and after Nell, it would seem that Dickens takes this particular brand of stupidity as something to be proud of, write home about. It took me so long to get through this because it kept jarring on me.

The Patriarch who should have been a greater villain or affected me more, didn't affect me at all. The scenes that included him seemed to be lacking in life and colour.

Flintwich and Blandois were too unpleasant and made me want to kill each. So Blandois is crushed to death and Flintwich escapes (is that fair?).

My favourite character, the one who always made me laugh (yes, right through to the pathetic, affecting finale) was Mr F's Aunt. I don't think Flora was quite so successful a creation (when it comes to women who ramble and lose their point in the rambling, I prefer Mrs Nickleby) I was always giggling and chortling out loud whenever she had a scene. She was an absurdity thrown in at the right and wrong places to defuse the tension and I loved her. She was a truly Dickensian creation. As were all of them, but maybe, the others, so serious, so caricatured...were not so.

At least I learned where "prunes and prisms" come from. Mrs General. And Jo, from Little Women, who ranted against prunes and prisms...well, now I know what she was talking about.

The thing about reading Dickens is that you start to see references to him throughout other people's fiction and life stories. Now I am reading Emily Dickinson's biography and there are plenty of Dickensian references. Whether it's to Micawber or Sam Weller (I'm so glad I started with David Copperfield and finally know who Micawber is).

I'm watching Bleak House now, which my friend Zarinah sent me as a Christmas present. It's a very good production, although I think more could have been made of the closeness between Ada and Esther and I don't think it did justice to the character of John Jarndyce. Here it suggests that he was sexually attracted to Esther, rather than regarding her as a benevolent patron. Maybe the benevolent patron bit wouldn't have translated into a 21st century production. And Esther speaks sharply to him, which she would, on no account, have done.

I write this from JB. It's three days after Christmas. The house has emptied out today. And Arnold is sleeping in the hall, because I'm here. And because I've had a cup of coffee (so as not to waste it), I'm wide awake and will be watching some more Bleak House.

One thing I notice is that because of the sheer number of characters in the book, the miniseries has difficulty in introducing/developing them all, except for the main characters. And those too, some of them not to well-developed.

Thinking about it, maybe Ada Clare was not well-developed in the book either. She was pretty, she had an affectionate heart, she was loyal. And that was it. Richard and Esther were much more well-drawn.

My next book will be A Tale of Two Cities. I feel that after such a book as Little Dorrit, I need to reward myself with one of his best.

Stalling

I haven't anything to update, really. I haven't picked up Little Dorrit since I laid it down and wrote that last post. It doesn't call to me like Bleak House did or even Martin Chuzzlewit or Nicholas Nickleby or Our Mutual Friend.

No, it lies a cold dead thing in my iPad...I haven't been able to get past the meeting of the two villains.

There is something to be said for CS Lewis's Perelandra where he described the evil as tedious more than anything else. Going through the new machinations of a truly horrendous mind is boring.

I guess that's why they invented people like Hannibal Lechter to up the ante and to make people keep watching. And they have to keep upping the ante, putting creativity and imagination into new and wonderful ways for people to be cruel and base and simply disgusting.

That's why I like children's (though not Young Adult books, especially Robert Cormier). Your villain (though bad) can't be too evil. You can have Jardis. But not Lechter. (Although we do now that Voldermort tortured and killed...it's just that the last three books are YA and most of his torture is offstage).

So instead of reading Little Dorrit, I read Cheryl's Strayed's Wild, Cameron Gunn's Ben & Me and have now started on Will Schwalbe's The End of Your Life Book Club. In England I bought a whole lot of literary biographies and autobiographies (Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Eudora Welty, Lytton Strachey, Emily Dickinson, Vladimir Nabokov), Vasari's Life of Artists (Part 1) and Dorothy Wordsworth's journals.

Yesterday I was at Kinokuniya buying people a whole lot of books for Christmas.

All of which has absolutely nothing to do with Dickens. But I thought I would record it nonetheless, as this seems to be the only blog I update.

I haven't renewed my car insurance or road tax and yesterday I got stopped by police during a roadblock. In fact, Marking yesterday seems to have been an ill-advised project all around. I was too tired, I lost my phone and now, I don't know how I'm going to pay for my car insurance. I wonder if they will let me put it on the card.

On the bright side most of the deadlines have been meet and there is nothing urgent I have to deliver for the rest of the year.

Maggot has just walked in stretched himself out in my room. Which I was sort of in the middle of cleaning.

Today, I decided to hell with other obligations, I'd stay in and do the chores that had gone begging for the past few weeks.

And then I could wrap and label presents, write out cards for my colleagues and then, and then... by the end of next week, I'm done.

But I'm not looking forward to Christmas this year. No Dickensian good cheer in this part of the woods.

Little Dorrit...eventually

So I've started and am halfway through (at least I hope I'm halfway through) my next Dickens, Little Dorrit. Being in England as I update it makes it come alive for me. I know this is one of his more difficult novels to read (one uncle who had to do it for literature described it as painfully boring and my sister Jackie was not able to finish it).

I wondered why. I guess evil (and there is so much evil in this) is tedious. You're just skimming through it hoping to get to the part where he deals effectively with the villain, cutting them down in their not-so-prime. The thing I love most about Dickens is that he has a Sidneyesque sense of justice. Bad men who beat their wives die. (I'm hoping this remains true in this book because the bad man or men, are particularly noxious).

But ploughing through it, (sometimes excessive virtue and a refusal to blame or to see someone for what they are - Nell-Grandfather, Little Dorrit-Father - tires me. But I can see why Little Dorrit keeps making excuses for her weak and selfish father, sacrificing herself, denying herself to gratify his every whim so he can live in the Marshalsea Prison like a poor approximation of a lord. She worries about the whole family. And they, a product of their upbringing and surroundings, take it for granted and don't really care very much for her.

Other people see her for what she is though, and other people try to help her.

Arthur Clennam's former sweetheart Flora makes me laugh with her confusing speech, no commas, always hinting at something that doesn't exist anymore...pretending when there is no cause to. But it's her aunt, the woman with the glaring visage and vicious bark that makes me chortle so hard I spit out my soup.I think she is a creation of genius and to find a character like her (up there with the man in smalls who courted Mrs Nickleby over the fence, after throwing vegetable marrows at her head) is, well, a delightful surprise. I love it when she fixes Arthur Clenham with that glare.

And then comes out with something like:

"There are milestones on the way to Dover."

Which doesn't mean anything, but nobody seems to mind, except for Arthur, who is trying desperately to grasp what is behind the malevolence of these apparently unconnected, disjointed statements.

Ah me.

Well, I'll update again, when I have finished the book. And when I have, there will only be three more to go.

Methinks, it is possible that I'll be done with Dickens 2012, why, in 2012 itself.

And then I'll move on to Hardy.

And we went out of the ruined place...

OK I finished it. I thought I'd read about 100 iPad pages and then I kept reading and reading (because it gets tremendously exciting at the end and he slowly peels away the curtain to reveal more and more about the mysteries of the book).

I guess I started liking Pip when he first stopped thinking of himself and started thinking, well, first of Herbert, then of Magwitch...and I guess even if he abandoned Joe and Biddy, the consciousness of this abandonment was always there with him, like a prod.

Joe was as simple and selfless as Tom Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit. And yet, he's a more finished character than Pinch. He had enough pride not to be patronised. But his goodness in coming to the rescue after Pip had abandoned him, and to never cast it up to him or demand gratitude or, when Pip at the end begged to be forgiven, to say there was nothing to forgive. People like him make you cry with their simple goodness. There is a quality of purity of heart, that is so rare, that when you meet characters like that, you pause, smile and want to be around them. The absence of malice is so refreshing, ice particles in your lungs.

Funnily enough, in reading this, I kept thinking of Angels in America. Maybe because, except for Roy Cohn, there was no real villain. I felt sorry for the guys who were supposed to be the villains...they were either weak or well meaning...Human beings are so complex. They are the very good and the very bad, but most people fall in between.

And Pip, who was so flawed, yet human, I started to like him when he warmed up to Magwitch, when he stayed with him through the trial, visited him, held his hand, read to him in jail, and eased his passing. That, to me, was even better, than how he served Herbert.

I think Pip became admirable. And the scene where he says goodbye to Estella, who remains cold and indifferent...the passion, wow, I think that was the best one in the book. I would copy it here. But I'm too lazy and it's nearly three in the morning and I'm tired.

I read somewhere that there were two endings. So after reading the ending in the little e-book (which I think was the second revised ending) I went online to look for the first one. I know the first one is preferred by the purists. And when I read this book all those years ago at 14 (understanding and appreciating so very little of it that I wonder I bothered) I read the original ending. I remember that little Pip had been with Pip and Estella kissed him, thinking he was Pip's child.

But I loved the second ending. The first, I thought, was too hard. Abrupt. The second was beautiful, sad, melancholy. It was open-ended and ambiguous. On the one hand, it could be read as if Pip and Estella finally got together. But it seemed more like a resolution of something outstanding, some hurt, some pain, some indifference, some bitterness. She had suffered much, it had tempered her proud spirit and now she understood what his heart had been. He had suffered much, it had tempered his spirit in turn, and he had never wavered in loving her.

By the bye, Pip's description of his hopeless love, how he had never been happy for one minute in her presence, but never wanted to be out of it, how he could see her for what she was, faults and all, but it didn't make the slightest bit of difference, that was what rang truest for me. I guess you can keep coming back to Great Expectations throughout your life (why had I only read it once?) and there would be something new to wring your heart.

Miss Havisham...she was vivid and frightening...the dreams discarded and decayed, the insistence on an exaggerated mourning which blighted not only her life but all those around, the conflagration consuming that tattered wedding dress and her flesh in the bargain, metaphor upon metaphor upon metaphor.

There were so many broken people in this book. And I guess you can see what a master Dickens is, because he gathers up their tatters and holds them all together. Broken as they are. There are others who try for this level of honesty or realism but who fail signally. You know they fail, because you lose interest in the characters, close the book halfway or find your attention wandering.

Not so with Great Expectations. Here, your attention is fixed on the page and you turn each breathlessly.

What a cast of characters. Joe and Biddy only come in at the beginning and the end, yet their spectres pervade young Pip's imaginings. He keeps them in a corner of his soul, and there is always the flavour of guilt in everything he does, thinks, feels...

I loved this book. And maybe after I'm done, I will come back to it.

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

The Likeability Factor

Pip is a complex character. He's not easy to like. They say gratitude is the least of virtues, ingratitude, the worst of vices. And his ingratitude, coupled with his grandiosity, makes him doubly horrendous.

But, I guess you can admire his candour. This book is a remembrance of things past. It is emotion recollected in tranquility. He sees his mistakes, he takes care to point them out.

And there is quite a bit of humour here.

Anyway, whatever it is, it's not boring. When I read, I get engrossed and I think I will be done before this week is through.

I'm halfway through the book now. Pip has left Joe, Biddy and his sister and moved to London where he is being tutored by Matthew Pocket, a relation of Miss Havisham. By the bye, I can understand why Miss Havisham is the most studied character in the book. That chapter where she is introduced is the most compelling in the book. And Pip's description of her room, her wedding cake, her wedding dress...(I wonder how all this smelt). You could go over it again, and again, and again and learn something new on each re-reading. Maybe this is why Great Expectations is one of the most re-read books of the Dickens' cannon.

Anyway, will say more when I get through with the book.

Great Expectations

So yesterday, I finally finished The Uncommercial Traveller. No, it didn't take that long to read, it just kept not holding my attention and although I was supposed to have been done ages ago, well, I wasn't. There was still some good bits right through to the end, but well, it was interspersed with bits I skimmed over, didn't really read or register. I'm sorry, but when he's preachy or trying to be too clever, I just get bored.

The good news is, the moment I clicked out of Uncommercial Traveller and ran through the selection of his books I have yet to read, I decided on (as you probably guessed from the title of this post), Great Expectations.

I thought I'd just read the beginning, you know, the bit everyone knows, where Pip is standing at the churchyard, admiring his parents' and brothers' graves (a row of little lozenges) and starting to cry when the convict caught him and terrified the bejeezus out of the little dude (incidentally, this particular passage is gone through in great detail in Robert Olen Butler's "From Where You Dream" book on writing) when I found I couldn't put it down.

I read the first 50 pages (the last time I read Great Expectations was nearly 20 years ago) so I didn't remember most of the story. I remember that Joe was nice and that Pip's red-faced sister who was "bringing him up by hand" was not, and that Pip hated (OK, there is no softer word for it, though for a child to use that word at that age would have been considered 'wicked' so he uses a lot of other words instead, but it comes to the same thing).

So I read about Pip stealing the food and Joe's file for the convict, getting it out to him, being terrified at lunch in case his sister discover the loss and know it was him, the chase given by the soldiers to recapture the convicts, the fact that the convicts were supposed to be on a ship called The Hulk...Pip learning to write and trying to teach Joe, Joe, only knowing the two letters J and O...his learning had been impeded by his father's drinking...

It was way past midnight and young Arnold, whom I'd been cuddling, disengaged himself and went to settle himself on the sofa. The light was bothering him. Before that he had been sleeping against the front door, a sure fire sign that he wanted to go out and, engrossed in my new book, I had ignored him.

So I opened the front door, that worthy made his way off the sofa (no, he shouldn't have been on there in the first place) and staggered out. I sat on the neighbour's culvert, swatted mosquitoes, and read on. The iPad is about the only thing it is comfortable to read under the street lamps. The road was wet.

One of the neighbour's seemed to be having a party. The house was shuttered, there were no cars parked haphazard all over the road, as there are when the others have a party, but loud voices and loud laughter issued from it.

Arnold stopped for a bit, uncertain, and looked in the direction of the noise. Then he took off, and I sat on the sloping culvert and read on, looking up every so often to see if he were coming back. It was late, I was tired, but that's how engrossing the book was. I laughed out loud at the sight of Pip's little letter, all misspelled, which Joe was so inordinately proud of.

And then I heard the patter of little feet and my little black dog emerged from the darkness, running towards home, mouth open, tongue hanging out, a loose doggie smile playing upon his lips. He aimed straight for the gate, so I went in after him, shut it, locked up the house, and then he headed straight for his bed.

I locked the door, put away the iPad and went to sleep. I was supposed to have taken off early in the morning for JB. Instead, I slept in a little (a lot) longer and took off late.

I have a feeling it's not going to take me so long to read Great Expectations. The story is riveting from the word "go". I can't wait to see what happens next. Which is what I've found with all his novels, but not so much his non-fiction.

But maybe that's just me.

A real Dickens connoisseur would appreciate it all, down to the last letter.

The Uncommercial Traveller

Sigh, I am about 50 pages away from the end of the Uncommercial Traveller and I do so wish it was over already. Although there were spots of brightness (like when Dickens reminisces about his childhood and becomes amusing and charmingly absurd (just read the chapter on medicine men, where he describes how ridiculous a funeral procession actually is) or when he talked about lawyer's chambers, a theme, if you would remember, in Pickwick, a lot of it drags.

He is at his preachy worst here.

I was thinking of how much I loved Virginia Woolf's essays (even more so than her fiction which takes some getting into, not being the most accessible stuff in the world) and how for the most part I love Dickens's fiction and hate his essays or articles.

I keep doggedly on, reading about 100 pages on my little iPad a day, until yesterday, when I should have finished, but could not, simply could not, face it.

So today, instead of reading it on the iPad, I tried for a spell on my laptop, downloading the Penn State PDF version, and oh my, I read two stories, or rather one a half and how it dragged, until finally, I X-ed out of the window, without bothering to finish. It will keep till tomorrow.

And so will I, as I drag my weary footsteps through the last pages of this book, happily to close it once and for all, and never to revisit it.

Funny to think that the Uncommercial Traveller actually inspired that theatre exercise which they took around the world. Which means other people obviously liked it a whole lot better than me.

But to be fair, that exercise was based on only one chapter of the book, the chapter where Dickens has insomnia and goes wandering through the streets of London at night, when everything has taken on an unfamiliar hue and you wander and wander, hoping for a light in the window, hoping that someone else is up late keeping a vigil, so you feel companioned.

But, as I said.

That was only one chapter.

I'm feeling very tired these days. A weariness that has settled in my bones. I go through the motions, but it's like part of me is off somewhere (like Dickens wandering the night streets) not really interested in what's happening around me, not really interested in what I am doing, not really caring about anyone around me.

Compassion fatigue?

Or just fatigue?

The other day, I was driving, and suddenly I remembered an episode from The Waltons (I think it was the first episode, Season One where a little deaf girl is left on the doorstep and the Waltons take her in) and something about the scene brought tears to my eyes.

Strange. Real life fails to move me.

A vestige of memory of fiction does.

For a heart rending second I think I am going to burst into sobs and I control the heavy exhalations. Allow the tears to course freely from my eyes, but trying desperately not to scrunch up my face into its mask of misery so that all the cars around can see what I'm doing.

It's the idea of family that makes me cry.

While in real life, it leaves me cold, hollow, lifeless, anger calcified into quartz.

Of such absurdities is life made...and Dickens, in his own voice, fails to move, but I will journey on to the end, and will not mark the ending by any new words (because I don't want to) and will move on to the next book in my list, wending my weary way home.

Muddy Fogs and Other Benign Disasters

Technically, if it's "One Year" with Dickens, I don't have to finish in December. I have until next June. Dickens 2012 be damned! Anyway, I got through The Mudfog Papers and, well, it was not one of my favourite. Let me put it that way. I read it because it had been mentioned by the Dickens lady who came here for The Uncommercial Traveller do, and with a name like Mudfog, well, how couldn't it be interesting?

How wrong I was.

The characters are all highly stylised. He takes his characteristic humour and carries it too far. While in books like Pickwick, it skirts on the verge of cruelty but never quite gets there (being too full of the milk of human kindness), here it is out and out cruel.

When I read about a pug dog being killed and dissected, I had to stop and put it away for a while. And I would have stopped reading the stupid Mudfog papers then and there except that I had promised myself to read ALL OF DICKENS and like it or not, Mudfog is part of the cannon, though not that popular a part. (In fact, many literate and literary people haven't heard of it).

He mocks everyone and everything, including at one point (at least I think, because the character being made fun of was a literary lion), himself.

And he ends it on this discordant note about giving up his two and a half year old, which seems a little cruel (and in keeping with the rest of the book) until you realise that he's talking about the manuscript itself.

He shouldn't have given it up. He should have kept it, perhaps for reference, to be used and worked into something else. Or else burnt it.

I'm moving on to a real book next but have just not decided which real book. I have Dombey & Son, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Hard Times, Great Expectations and The Uncommercial Traveller downloaded on my iPad.

Wish I was not so scatty and could pick one and stick with it. Some of these books are weighty indeed (but anything would be preferable to Mudfog).

No picture because I'm too disgusted.

Oliver Twist, Mr Bumble, You Named Him So Yourself!

Oliver Twist starts with a macabre sort of humour before it descends into pathos. Dickens affects to be amused by all those cruel wo/men who mistreat Oliver, starve him, beat him and finally, force him to runaway through their combined cruelty.

Reading this, I realised that the musical was pretty far off and it skated over some of the more difficult/painful events. Artful Dodger wasn't cute. He was vile (though funny). Oliver didn't take to him. And Fagin was utterly disgusting. However, not in keeping with what later became his usual practice, Dickens lets us know that he's going to be hanged (and how) but doesn't let us peep in at the hanging.

Bill Sikes, well, he accidentally hanged himself, didn't he? And still, considering his crimes and his cruelty, his death didn't seem retribution enough. The murder of Nancy was a thing of nightmares. But perhaps, considering that she remained loyal to him till the end and wouldn't leave him, although she was offered a chance of escape and a better life, perhaps death was best. But what a death. The only good thing I could see in it was that it unstoppered a dam, and justice long delayed, finally flowed on the heads of all those disgusting creatures. Dickens didn't treat them with a light hand, especially Fagin, whom he simply designated as "the Jew". I would have considered him anti-Semitic, except for his depiction of a very different Jew in Our Mutual Friend, who was friend of one of the heroines, Lizzie Hexam.

Oliver himself played a very active role in the first half of the book. How he is born, mistreated from birth, almost, how he runs away, how he falls in with Fagin and the boys, how he is rescued the first time by the "benevolent gentleman", Mr Brownlow, how he is kidnapped again by Fagin's boys (through the good or rather bad offices of Nancy), how he is used for a robbery, and then rescued again, this time by the benevolent Mrs Maylie and the beautiful Rose Maylie (who was a piece with all Dickens's heroines except that there seems to have been a cloud over her parentage), and then he fades out of the picture and we see the adults fighting among themselves - to establish his identity.

By a series of coincidences that could only happen in a Dickens (or Wilkie Collins) novel, his first rescuer is his father's best friend, and his second, his own aunt.

Mr Bumble was meant to be a comic character. The funny thing is he decides to get married, thinking this widow is comfortably provided for, and she turns out to be a she-devil who controls him effectively. She's the stronger of the two...and the eviller...and finally they separate as paupers.

Sometimes I wonder at his use of humour...but I guess he does it to underline something particularly horrific and ridiculous (as in the Poor Laws and the treatment of paupers or orphans).

However, I've started on Mudfog and I find the writing of extremely crude. When he tried to pass off the dissection of that pug dog as humorous...I had to stop reading. But who knows, maybe it improves. The one good thing about Mudfog is that it's pretty short.

I thought I had only one or two novels left when I checked, it was more like 10. Never mind. For the most part, the novels are extremely enjoyable. (Mudfog notwithstanding). I like the fact that he puts some mystery in the midst of most of his novels, and the unraveling of said mystery provides some of the narrative drive.
But the writing itself, the descriptions, the humour, that's what keeps you turning the pages.

In this book, like in most his books, Dickens sometimes emerges, and addresses the reader as the author, breaking the flow...this time, he came on to explain how he alternates tragedy with the ridiculous, to break the tension...and he kindly tells us that to be able to do it effectively takes genius. Oh well done, Chuckie boy, now we know.

Bleak House

The name is deceptive. I held off reading this book for the longest time because I thought it would be...well, bleak. But I have to say, it was one of the liveliest Dickens books I have read. Third only to Pickwick and Christmas Carol, and those two are ahead by virtue of long association and affection.

I loved the character of Esther Summerson. At the beginning, I was afraid she would be just another of Dickens's delicate heroines, gentle, weeping, fainting all the time, but she wasn't. She was robust. And how!

The thing I liked best about her is that she didn't wait around, weeping over the afflicted, but that she did some practical good wherever she went. No wonder she was beloved.

Richard Carstone, well, I didn't like him very much and although Dickens did his best to soften his flaws, telling these through the eyes of affection rather than judgement, I couldn't help but feel he was really spoiled and selfish. If it was his own life to trifle with, then by all means, waste it. But when he took Ada's heart into his keeping and continued on this deathly road, well then, his selfishness, more than anything else, shone through.

It was an interesting twist that the heroine of the piece was no longer beautiful, that her beauty had been ravaged by a pox, and that she still continued beloved by all who knew her. Except for that stupid clerk who firstly, had the audacity to propose to her, secondly, the audacity to pull back his proposal and thirdly, the audacity to get highly offended when he re-offered his hand and it was summarily rejected. I don't even know what to make of his mother.

Some of the characters (like the virtual child who let everyone else pay his pay through life, Harold Skimpole). I couldn't regard him as a "child" but as a selfish, spoiled, evil man. Expecting everyone to take care of him as a matter of course, and then ungrateful when the flow stopped. He should have been left to starve early on in his life. But he wasn't. How is it that people like survive?

Although he did die, five years after John Jarndyce withdrew his support, which I guess, is something.

John Jarndyce was a lovely character. I really liked him. I liked that in this novel at least, Dickens didn't drag on any misery. Although Esther was not miserable at the thought of having to marry Jarndyce as she loved him dearly as her guardian and the man who had saved her.

The woman who brought her up was a little hard to fathom. She was cold, heartless, and what she did to that little girl! But yet, Esther not only survived her treatment and insinuations, but went on to thrive.

The whole Lady Dedlock affair...the way she was chased into a corner, and her husband's reaction to it - how he loved his wife above any scandal, above his name, above everything else. That was heart warming.

And the ne'er do well son, George, who came back to a prodigal's welcome. Actually although this book had a lot of evil characters and drama...(and I think Dickens went out of his way to caricature the evil ones - they were always hideously ugly) it abounded with "the good in men's hearts". Or rather, "the good in women's hearts". I couldn't quite reconcile myself to the fact that he did not bother to save the brick-makers wives from their sorry fate (black eyes, every other day) but other than that, things seem to have been taken care of admirably.

The book held my attention throughout...the only parts I found it dragging was when that stupid clerk, Guppy was speaking. I found it hard to endure his prose...there was something so lifeless and affected about everything he said.

Tulkinghorn was an interesting character. Evil, I think, and even in death, he caused considerable trouble. I am not quite sure how Inspector Bucket went from being a villain to a hero (how he treated that young forlorn boy Jo was unforgivable, in my book) but somehow, there seems to have been a flip at the end.

I wish I had written this straight after reading the book, when I was still so full of it. Now time has softened the impressions and having to churn out so many stories in a short space of time has absorbed my energy and my memory. Maybe someday I'll re-read the book and then I'll come back here and add to my impressions of it.

For now, I'll be moving on to Oliver Twist, just as soon as I can.

I'm aware that I haven't said much about Chancery. Maybe that's because in the distance of time, it was the human drama rather than the lawsuit, this ogre in the background eating up their lives, that stuck with me. Dickens was accused of being unfair to lawyers and to the court system...and he takes issue with that straight off, in his usual funny, mocking way.

I lost the tortoise, Toto. Hopefully when I next update this blog I will be able to bring you cheerier tidings. Like, I found the tortoise. And put him back in his tank.

Ah me.

The Old Curiosity Shop

I finished this book in the wee hours of Wednesday morning when I should have been either sleeping or plugging away at the 10 stories I still owed Anna for the supplement. I couldn't put it down.

But maybe because of the pressure I was under, or because I was aware that I would pay for having read that book when I was supposed to be working, I felt my irritation mount.

Nell was too good. The old man was too much of a dotard. Quilp was too evil....just grotesque figures swirling all around and this pretty little (child?) in the midst. I hated how Dickens kept calling her a child when by the end of the book she was at least 15.

Child?

And when the old man first beggared them with his gambling and then when he stole her money and made all those calls on her purse keeping the child he professed to love on such short commons, when he forced her through his behaviour to take flight from that comfortable job and that comfortable lady, and in doing so, forced her into the journey that ultimately killed her, I was aghast.

How could she love this man?

The famous death scene: I was left unmoved because it depended on you feeling compassion for the old dotard and I felt none. I kept thinking that if Nell hadn't been so careful of his life and let him die or be institutionalised it would have been better for her.

So it was lucky I didn't write this until after I'd had a few days to calm down and think about it.

A few days...

Taking Arnold and Maggot for a walk and thinking about it (Dickens, like Shakespeare, can never leave you unmoved) I realised that the whole point of the novel was that the old man didn't "deserve" her love. He wasn't good, or virtuous, or self sacrificing or anything. His love for her was a thin, grasping, clutching, evil thing.

And I don't even know if Dickens meant us to believe that he gambled for love of her. He gambled because it was a compulsion. He gambled because he had lost all shame or dignity and sunk to the level of a beast.

The point was that Nell loved him though she saw all this. She loved him despite what he was. Instead of for what he was.

And therein lay her magic. Her influence. Her pathos.

She loved him and kept loving him when he demonstrated over and over again that he didn't even deserve the barest affection. I guess it takes a large, large heart, even one in a frail, frail body, to love like that.

Of all the side stories, I loved the Dick Swiveller sub plot the most. It seemed that Dickens introduced him a certain way, all set for a certain course and then changed his mind. And he introduced Nell's brother Fred, and then changed his mind and kept him on the sidelines...even the confrontation with the mysterious old man, the granduncle, was left offstage.

I thawed towards him when he was kind to that little servant girl...when he saw how she was starved (both for food and company) and he bought her food and played with her. And then she saved his life. It was very very sweet, that. I found it more touching than the main story, I guess because Nell's grandfather simply disgusted me...but then, come to think of it, he was punished in the worst way possible. Her death. And her death at his door.

I wish they had resolved the parentage of that little servant girl because I was curious about it and he hinted darkly at her parentage. But never mind, I guess he was entitled to keep at least one of his secrets.

It seemed a little funny how he started the book from this stranger's point of view (and an accurate point of view, at that) and then he suddenly switched that off and never allowed that man back in the story again.

Kind of like Martin Chuzzlewit where he introduced various family members who went on to have nothing to do with the story, except for a few who showed up at the end for a wedding that never took place.

Quilp enraged me beyond belief....and I was glad he was dealt with so summarily...not even the dignity of a spectacular death - just a by the bye that didn't make any difference to anybody. Body fished out. Tortured wife now rich. Married again soon after.

Sometimes I shuddered on reading about him because I recognised in his misantrophic thoughts my own...I hate Quilp, because frankly my dear, I am Quilp. A hideous little dwarf, dancing around, making faces and hating everybody.

Kyrie Eleison

I've finished Our Mutual Friend. Maybe I'm suffering from Dickens-fatigue and need to take a break because whatever the subtleties of this book, they were wasted on me. OK, I have to admit that his presentation of the great mystery was masterfully done. I thought John Rokesmith's identity was the mystery although it was glaringly obvious from the first page who he was. But Dickens kindly informs us in the afterword that it wasn't. There was a greater mystery. And yes, I was surprised when that was revealed. I never suspected and I was thinking...hmmm...too many loose ends to tie up, and yet all were tied up beautifully when the deeper mystery was revealed.

I wonder that Bella didn't resent it more when all was revealed but I guess she was a true penitent and saw herself for what she used to be and didn't shrink from the fact that others may have seen it too.

Bradley Headstone and his hatred and his jealousy and his passion (in the worst possible sense) was an enigma. There was not one softening influence here. He was all bad and so very bad at that. You are not supposed to feel sorry for him. A wretch through and through.

I'm glad Lizzie Hexam was strong enough to resist her brother's selfishness...he lost the most by being so selfish. So careful of his own skin and his own reputation, he lost his sister who was probably the best thing in his life. He was "raising himself up" to respectability. But Wrayburn took his measure from the first. I rather liked Wrayburn.

OK, the Veneerings...I know he meant to make fun of society and reveal the falseness beneath but I think a gentler touch would have been more effective. What with the Veneerings and the Podsnaps and the Buffers....and let's not forget Lady Tippins, he only succeeded in creating the grotesque. And yet, at the end, little Twemlow, a true gentleman, comes out shining.

Away false people, away with the brightness of your teeth and the pomatum in your hair.

Maybe it was a little too whimsical for my taste. And all the faults they could heap on the other books - sentimentality, little Nells, bland heroines...but no. Neither Bella nor Lizzie were bland. Though there was a touch of Dolly Varden in our Bella with her rosy kissable lips and who was loved because she was pretty.....the way Dolly was.

The Lammles were scary. Especially Alfred Lammle. I can't think why his wife didn't leave him when he was so awful. I liked the Doll's Dressmaker. She was a valiant little thing. And in the end, Dickens hinted that Sloppy would be the one to take her little hand.

Amazing.

Betty Highden....I know he was trying to make a point, but here too, a gentler touch would have made it more effective. As it was she was so overdrawn as to appear ridiculous. Sad. But ridiculous.

I can't wait for the book in which there is a spontaneous combustion.

Bleak House.

I wonder when I'll get to that.

I Still Haven't Figured Out Who The Mutual Friend Is

I am only seven chapters into Our Mutual Friend and I find it hard going. Maybe I'm going to have to go back and start from the beginning. From the little I have just read, it is Dickens's last completed novel. Go figure. I find his style, his switching between tenses, his use of the present continuous, his introduction of the grotesque (Silas Wegg going to watzisname to buy back his own limb) to be rather disconcerting.

Never mind.

I shall start again and more slowly this time.

Jeanette Winterson always said you have to read a novel at its speed and not at your own. I have been spoilt by the earlier rollicking Dickensian novels, which I could read at any speed I wanted. Also, because I knew them better or had heard of them more, or had read long introductions, they were much easier to digest.

Here, I don't know if I'm standing on my head or tail. So, a leetle more difficult.

Never mind.

I have a whole year to read the novels. And this is already my 6th. I don't know if it's having any effect on me, except that I was writing an obituary and I ended it sort of Little Nell-ish (although the Old Curiosity Shop is not one of the 6).

But that gives me an idea. After Our Mutual Friend, I shall read Old Curiosity Shop and wait for the famous scene, wherein, the little flower expires. The scene that Oscar Wilde made so much fun of, and the scene that even the William books (in fact, the first William book, Just William made fun of as well).

I think it's interesting that everyone had common references before and if you made fun of something, everyone knew what you were talking about. Here, you would have common references to certain sitcoms, but not as many as you like. Everyone knew who Pickwick was. Or Little Nell. Or Scrooge.

Come to think of it, everyone still knows who Scrooge is.

How's that for endurance, huh?

Our Mutual Friend

I finished Nicholas Nickleby at Starbucks and I'd forgotten how peculiarly satisfying happy endings are. Of course I cried when Smike died although I didn't see a situation where he could have survived and been happy. In Martin Chuzzlewit, Tom Pinch whose love was unrequited and would only ever be unrequited was still better off. He had a sister who loved and treasured him and a friend who was to be his sister's husband who treasured him likewise. The people around him had a true appreciation of his good qualities.

Smike on the other hand was there on sufferance only. No matter how kind Nicholas was to him, it was an act of charity. NIcholas was kind and he cared for the wretched boy who had never known kindness since he was born. But it was not the same. As Charles Cheeryble pointed out, he would have felt his deficiencies more and more as time went by.

He was truly a tragic character and I snuffled my way through that bit as I always do. I can't remember how many times I've read Nicholas Nickleby, but it's not as many times as I've read Pickwick. I'd forgotten a lot of the story and it was a pleasant surprise, most times to discover all the bits I'd forgotten. Or rather, rediscover.

Which is why it's so weird to read Our Mutual Friend. I'm 5 chapters into it and it is a strange book altogether, not even written in his usual style (I think so far I've been reading his early books and his is one of his late ones) and I find it a little confusing and a little took arty at times.

Yes, there is the Dickens sarcasm, but the way it is couched well I have to read the same line a few times to get at his meaning.

There's is a murder, there is a mystery, there's is a fractious woman and rubicund man. There are upstarts with no father or grandfathers of any name trying to make it in society. There is a virtuous daughter and a cantankerous father. All elements for a great story?

Let me read a little more and I'll tell you.

Nick and Kate

You know what sucks? That blogger and Facebook insist on changing your interface without even giving you an option. What the hey? Would it hurt them to have some stay on the old interface and those who want to migrate to the new one? Would it? Would it? When they changed my interface, I changed it back. And now they tell me I have no choice. Maybe Wordpress IS better after all.

Which has nothing whatsoever to do with Dickens, I know. Except what he writes about evil capitalists bending everyone to their will. And at least in Dickensland, they ultimately fail and hang themselves.

Which all goes to show that I'm reading Nicholas Nickleby now. In fact, I'm nearly done. 53 chapters into the book. Which has about 65 chapters. The chapters, however, are shorter than the Martin Chuzzlewit chapters. So I'm getting through the book at a rapid pace.

At the beginning I was surprised to find that the scenes at Dotheboys Hall consisted only of about 4 chapters or so. It made such an impression on my mind when I first read it that I thought it comprised at least half the book.

Nay, not so.

Nicholas does different things, teaching, tutoring the Kenwigs daughters in French, acting Romeo, writing plays...until he finally settles down as a book keeper in Cheeryble, Brothers. The moment the Cheeryble theme was introduced, I relaxed and settled down. With those deux ex machina were there nothing could ever be so bad again.

No, not nearly.

I forgot that Kate was a companion to that Mrs Witterly (she was forgettable). But I remember laughing fit to kill myself when Kate charged her with being "so much older" and she fell into hysterics. And her stupid husband who took his wife's vapours/hypocondhria as proof of her SOUL. Ugh.

I forgot (maybe because when I first read it I skipped through the passages) how much Dickens goes off track in some chapters beating his own particular dead horses (like the unlawful adaption of books for the stage). He has Nicholas talking about it and it seems strange, to say the least, coming from him, given that Nicholas was doing very much the same thing with the French plays, translating them to English and improvising here and there, and claiming to be author. I wonder if Dickens realised how inconsistent he was being. I mean OK the misery of the children in the Yorkshire schools and the likes of Squeers having charge of them, fine. At least that was disinterested. But when he blows his own trumpet and beats his own drum, he becomes wearying.

Also, I think this, more than any other book, has the worst heroines. I'm still at the part where Madeline Bray has consented to marry Arthur Gride to "save" her father. Call it what you may, turn it whichever way you want to, it seems spiritless of her to sacrifice her life in that way. The problem was she had a stupid mother who married for looks rather than character and on dying, charged her daughter to take care of her mistake (husband). I don't think Dickens pulls this off very well. In fact, by contrast, Kate seems a lot more spirited. At least she resented the insults offered to her by those so-called noblemen.

Anyway, I was in the actual chapter of the day of the wedding, and Jenny started talking to me about the obit I had written for Sabrina. So we talked of Sabrina for a bit and of what she did for those animals, and who was left to carry on her work. How suddenly she died. Those kinds of things.

And now I've come back to my place to work. Even if I don't feel like. I can take a leaf from Sabrina's book and just do what needs to be done. I don't have to feel like doing it. Just to do it.

Later for you

Chuzzlewit (I Make An End)

I just finished Martin Chuzzlewit. I read most of it on my iPad and my eyes are aching as a result...I don't think I'm much of an iPad reader...but I wanted to read Martin Chuzzlewit and that's not even available in Kinokuniya...one of his lesser favoured books.

But oh my, the chapters on America...nothing but nothing was good. He even took to task the Transcendentalists, which I thought rather mean. I know he and Emerson met. Wonder what Emerson thought of Dickens.

I thought he could have softened his picture without detracting from it. One Mr Bevan against all of the United States...ahem.

Anyway, I suspected from the beginning that old Martin was biding his time and allowing Pecksniff to expose himself fully. Funnily enough I thought this was the Dickens novel with spontaneous combustion and I kept waiting for either Pecksniff or Jonah to combust. Well, Pecksniff didn't, and Jonah, well Jonah just poisoned himself. The funny thing is, although Dickens sort of defends Jonah in the preface, explaining how he came to be the way he was, it didn't make the slightest difference.

The way he crushed Mercy (I wonder why she didn't run away from him and why it is deemed a virtue to remain with a brute and endure his torments) was beyond forgiveness. I don't care what he was brought up to.

Tom Pinch was lovable, although many were the times I felt I could shake him hard, for his unfailing belief in Pecksniff no matter how the latter treated him. But it was good that although he endured much on his own account, he didn't on his sister's. When he rescued her from that horrible house, and the two of them set forth together to live together and support each other, it was one of the best moments in the book.

And John Westlock was wonderful. Of course was going to fall in love with Tom's sister, seeing how much he esteemed and valued Tom.

The denouement was particularly satisfying (when Chuzzlewit struck Pecksniff with that stick, I wanted to stand up and cheer) and when he told Sairey Gamp to drink less and that good nurse fainted...hahahahahhahaha.

I felt a little sorry for Charity at the end....if she had been a man, and Augustus had been a woman, the marriage would have been forced through and endured...she was mean to her sister though and she had no heart and more of her father in her than was necessary.

Dickens swears by all that's holy that Pecksniff was taken from life.

And I guess, in this one instance, I believe him.

Mercy or Charity?

I'm one fifth ways through Martin Chuzzlewit....Dickens does sharpen his wits on the Pecksniff daughters. I don't know who he despises more, Charity or Mercy. I've read to the point of Martin Chuzzlewit the elder proposing an alliance of sorts with Pecksniff whom he hates. Methinks there's a trap and he's doing that to involve that good fellow in as much plotting/intrigue from the rest of the family as he sees fit. I guess he's finally devised a fitting punishment. Which is "live my life and see".

Haha...the book is very funny.

I was reading it on the iPad as I waited for my car to be serviced. It's passed the 10,000km mark. I was having difficulty using the iPad and so I reset my Apple ID and password and ce'st voila...it worked. So I sat in the Suzuki showroom and went through two chapters of Martin...I am not rushing it...there is a peculiar pleasure to reading the books, and now I realise that once I'm done, I'll be pretty sad.

But no matter, Dickens is eminently read-againable.

On other news Sabrina Yeap, the founder of Furry Friends Farm died. I think she was one of the truly great Malaysians. Furry Friends was one of the kindest sanctuaries...it was no-kill and all the animals there adored her.

I left Arnold there for about a month and by the time I came back to get him (because I couldn't take it anymore) he was so attached to her that he didn't want to come back. She told me Arnold had figured out how to open a particular gate and let the other dogs out, at which he would bark...because she was inside with the cats and he wanted her to come out. Tricksy little bumblebee.

I go off to Singapore tomorrow...but I'll bring the iPad and read Chuzzlewit in between all the other stuff I have to do.

Mercy or Charity?

Merry or Cherry?

You decide.

Martin Chuzzlewit (I Make A Beginning)

I've decided that I'm not just going to read his books. At least one I'll watch as a movie. At least one, I'll listen to the audio version. Problem is, you can't listen to him while doing something else. Yesterday, I began Martin Chuzzlewit, and I listened but barely one word in 10 was comprehensible. It starts off with a dose of Dickensian humour...but, you need to train your eyes on the page, concentrate on what he is saying, to get the full effect of it.

And in the beginning, at least one joke was lost until I read the text and realised that what had been said was actually very funny.

So, not having Martin Chuzzlewit on hand, I have to rely on Project Gutenberg. I've read the preface and the postscript and the first chapter, but not beyond that. I kept falling asleep last night while trying to read...the funny thing is, I had been in a roaring rage just prior to laying head on pillow which is usually good for a few hours of insomnia. But Dickens can have a soporific effect. His dense sentences full of humour and mockery, are surprising soothing.

They lull you.

All I know is that Chuzzlewit is about hypocrites.

And I prefer the novels about hypocrites to the novels about politics.

Although I don't think he has a novel that does not have hypocrites. At least, not among those I've read so far.

All three of them.

Hammocks On A Balmy Day

The others went out for a day about town while I elected to remain at the resort and swing on a hammock and read my book. Pickwick, of course. The hammock swayed gently and I sometimes glanced up at the needlelike leaves of the coniferous trees it was tied to, and bits of blue sky. The sounds of the sea broke in through it all. And it was so peaceful, I fell fast asleep, clutching my book to my chest.

Later, I woke up to stagger my way to my room, order room service (one club sandwich and one banana caramel tartlet with ice cream), which I enjoyed while reading about the little bachelor's party given by Bob Sawyer and the select footmen of Bath's soiree....as Sam would say, this is the first time I've heard of biled mutton being called a swarry...

Anyway, I fell asleep, woke up, read some more, curled up under the covers (the air con was a little on the cold side), fell asleep some more, woke up, read some more...had half the club sandwich for dinner (but not the banana tartlet though, because that was long gone), sighed through Mr Pickwick's wrongful incarceration at Fleet for a debt he refused to pay...

The hotel staff knocked on the door somewhere in the evening...asking if they could clean the room. They could. I sat out in the balcony and waited. And by the time I lifted my eyes from my book, the room was spick and span.

Ah, Pickwick, how I love you. How full of fun and good cheer you are. How every line is loaded, how you make fun of everything and everyone and do it so well. Matrimony, pretty ankles, fur-topped boots, black eyes, sighs and lamentations, gaiters and silk stockings, corpulence, fat boys who fall asleep standing up, pretty housemaids, widders (as Tony Weller would say with a shudder), Samivel, lawyers who know what's what, coachmen....stories around a bar, stories written down on pieces of paper, stories hurried along by mugs of ale...elections and fearsome editorials written in leading newspapers about the Opposition...ahhh Pickwick the priceless...what other book would give me half so much pleasure?

So, it is difficult to know where to go from here (maybe I should have saved this for last, but what's done is done) and what I should read next. I'm thinking Bleak House and although I don't seem to have the book here in KL, at least I can read it online, because well, all of Dickens is online, isn't it?

But wait, I know Nicholas Nickleby will give me pleasure as well...especially the Cheeryble brothers and Mrs Nickleby whom I find one of the most hilarious characters ever created.

OK, it's a toss up between her and Samivel's father (why worn't there an alleybi, Sammy?)

I'll let you know when I decide. Which should be soon. As I've got a year to read everything and Dickens did not believe in keeping it short. There is an expansiveness to his books, a space, that is utterly bewitching.

These days as we seek to compress everything into tiny little spaces, into soundbytes, into hacker-speak...what could be more of sheer indulgence than a thick novel by the fireside, nicely wrapped up, with the dog by my side, my pipe full of the old tobacco, maybe some milk punch or mulled wine to take off the edge of cold?

I'm thinking of cold now because the skies are dark and lowering and it's going to rain. Whenever that happens, the office becomes that much colder.

I shall now go back to transcribing whatever I recorded about the Ford Focus. But ah, it's lovely. Ah, it's addictive to drive...ah, what richness...maybe I could call it the Dickens of the automotive world.

The Blushful Hippocrene

I'm done with Barnaby Rudge and have started with Pickwick Papers. Now Pickwick is one Dickensian novel I have read over and over again. It (together with A Christmas Carol) are my two favourite Dickens's novels. There is something so homey and funny and cheerful about this book. It feels like curling up with an old friend, a mug of hot chocolate, under the duvet, when the skies are dark and lowering.

I've just come back from Singapore. I was there for a conference of sorts...slept my way through a seminar on "high performance analytics" and then forced myself to keep awake by taking weird notes.

One of the notes: "I wonder how Dickens would describe this guy?"

I arrived home late in the evening and decided to watch the last of the three LOTR films, extended version of course. When Theoden made his speech and rallied his troops..."Arise riders of Theoden"...I cried.

So Anna said my eyes were puffy this morning...like I'd been crying...and I thought, but I haven't had any recent heartbreak...then I remembered...oh yes, LOTR always makes me cry. It evokes strong emotions (when real life and people don't). So yes, I cried. And yes, I want to watch it all over again when there is no one to disturb me.

With all this, I want to take a break from Dickens and read some JRR Tolkien, not only the Lord of the Rings trilogy but the Silmarillion as well. I am intrigued by Galadriel's story and the Noldorin.

But back to Dickens. I loved Barnaby Rudge, and when Dolly Varden proposed to Joe...it was very satisfying. Also satisfying that although much was threatened, nothing happened to the two beautiful girls. (Even in David Copperfield, the fallen girl was ultimately redeemed, though not through marriage - he is kind to beautiful girls, even perhaps, Estella)

So anyway, there is no real love interest in Pickwick. I mean, there are a lot, but none really...it is about travelling about, staying at inns, good fellowship, listening to stories, making spurious discoveries, and drinking lots of hot punch, and rum, and wine.

Oh for a beaker for the warm South....

The Read-a-Thon

On February 7, the actual Dickens bi-centenary, Dickens 2012 project director Anna Dever wanted to do something extra special. It would have to be something all-encompassing, it would have to be international and it would have to do with what made Dickens most special – his books.

“I wanted to do something to show how many countries were involved. We were just joking around at first thinking what we could do. And we decided to do a reading, just a complete variety of people from different places coming together to read Dickens. I thought it summed up what I wanted to do with the project and to celebrate the kind of wide appeal of Dickens,” she says.

The response was tremendous. Schoolchildren in Ukraine read A Haunted Man. Actress and Dickens aficionado Miriam Margolyes thrilled with an excerpt from Dombey & Son in Australia. Some 10 Malaysians did a mash-up of a popular scene from The Pickwick Papers. Korea scored the “Please sir, I want some more,” from Oliver Twist. Little Nell expired in what is probably one of the most famous death scenes in literature in Japan. A Kazakh lady ‘bah humbug’ed her way through A Christmas Carol in the midst of a blizzard. A man read from Our Mutual Friend from a café in war-torn Damascus, Syria. And the 24-hours ended with a member of the British Council reading, perhaps appropriately from Hard Times in Iraq.

The readings, were pre-recorded in each country and sent to the British Council in five-minute installments which were uploaded to Twitter. “So on the hour, every hour on the bicentenary, we had a new reading posted which was only 5 minutes long and after that we pulled all the readings together into a highlights clip and then that evening we screened all the readings at the British Film Institute in London.”

What’s most amazing is that the whole thing was put together in less than two weeks. “It started out quite ambitious where I wanted to livestream everything and have it read at the exact times but it was impossible. So this was the next best thing. And the level of support we got from all the different countries was amazing. In such a short space of time they were able to go out and capture the readings, the majority of them in good quality.”

Dever tried to choose the more famous excerpts such as the introduction of A Tale of Two Cities, the death scene from A Curiosity Shop and “please sir, I want some more” from Oliver Twist. Those not familiar with the book, would probably remember that line from the musical.

“Greece wanted a political piece so we gave them a scene from Barnaby Rudge,” she says.

The Malaysian offering was especially good. It is a mash-up of different people of different backgrounds and ethnicities reading from Pickwick Papers. Grey Yeoh, the arts and programmes manager in Kuala Lumpur says they were aiming to showcase diversity.

“We had 10 or 11 people reading Pickwick Papers ranging from radio deejays to playwrights to writers to professional debaters and vocal trainers. We wanted to show not just different people but different backgrounds. So we had someone reading from a mamak stall, a radio station, a car, a Starbucks, a pantry, an apartment…”

The excerpt that Dever chose for Malaysia was the introduction of Samuel Weller, who went on to become arguably the most popular character in the Pickwick legend. Sam has a speech defect where he pronounces every “w” with a “v”. This made for some hilarious moments in the readings.

“It had the word ‘waggoner’ but because of the corruption of Sam’s accent, it was spelt ‘vagginer’. And the Malaysian readers were like, OK, of all the writings of Dickens, Malaysia got the one with ‘vagina’ in it? And they wondered how they were supposed to read it. And it was only later that the readers caught on to the fact that it was supposed to be ‘waggoner’ and not ‘vagina’,” Yeoh says with a chuckle.

Another thing people noted about the Malaysian clip was that every reader was using an electronic device, be it Kindle or iPad, rather than a book. “It was really interesting to see how the different people read. Some people, like those from Argentina, read from a dusty old book. And you guys had Kindles. So it was really a nice mixture,” Dever says.

That day, for the first time in its history, the British Council trended on Twitter. Dever remembers: “We got 20 to 30 million retweets and it got the coverage of the day. All the press in the UK was covering what was going on. We had an event at Westminster Abbey where Prince Charles and Camilla laid flowers on Dickens grave. The House of Parliament talked about Dickens work that day. I don’t think anybody knew how big it would be.”

Dickens is big in himself. But it would take an organisation with the reach of the British Council to put something of this magnitude together. “We exist in 110 countries around the world, and not necessarily only in the Commonwealth countries,” Yeoh points out.

What helped especially in this project is that so many countries wanted to be involved. So much so that it was impossible to accommodate them all. “We’ve got 70 different countries working on this Dickens 2012 project and the response has been insane. I received so many emails in February from unexpected countries saying, ‘we want to do the Dickens project, it relates to us so well.’”

Dickens, she points out, is in our contemporary subconscious. “Most people would have heard of Oliver Twist or A Christmas Carol. But it’s also interesting to see how much people have read. I spoke to someone from Uzbekistan who’s read all his books, and he just said, ‘yeah, it’s in the curriculum, that’s what we study’.

Just to give some context to that statement. Dickens wrote more than 30 books, fiction and non-fiction. If one were to do nothing except for read him end-to-end, it would take all of three months, according to biographer Peter Ackroyd who had to do just that. It is a daunting task and not one many people put themselves through.

The British Council has commissioned Electric Film, a company in the UK, which edited the readings, to put everything together with a round-up of everything that happened. The video is to be released online. Those who missed the readings can see it here at http://literature.britishcouncil.org/news/2012/january/readathon.

The Uncommercial Traveller

A group of 10 university students are sitting around a large courtyard in a heritage building behind China House on Beach Road in Georgetown in groups of three and four. One designated writer per group is tapping away on a laptop. It’s a balmy afternoon, the sleepy space between lunch and teatime and except for the tapping of the keyboards, there is a hushed silence.

The students, who are both literature and mass communications students from Universiti Sains Malaysia, are plugging away at their scripts, which will mostly run from eight to nine minutes, putting the finishing touches. The scripts will then be recorded by the students themselves, edited by the Punchdrunk Enrichment sound and graphics designer Stephen Dobbie and uploaded onto the British Council website.

From there, they can be downloaded to your various MP3 devices to serve as an audio guide through selected streets in Penang. Except that they’re nothing like any audio guide created by a tourism authority.

Take the following excerpt from the first journey uploaded onto the British Council website, simply entitled “Walk to your present”:

Here is an old unkempt workshop. The piercing sound of the hammer against the rusted cage-like metal is rhythmic and precise. You begin to wonder how much experience is in the rhythm of the hammer. I peered in to see the man wielding the hammer. He wore dirty blue shorts and a t-shirt. Is the workshop open? Is he there today? He caught my eyes with a knowing smile. He stopped his labour and he leaned against the wall.

I wanted to listen to his story and he was waiting for me to ask the right questions. How long had he been working with metal? Was he content? Are you content? Can anyone be capable of contentment hammering metal for life? What is in his future? Surely, he is a dying breed. These are the questions I asked that day. What questions would you ask that man?

The students are being guided by three people from Arcola Theatre and Punchdrunk Enrichment, who help them open their minds to a different way of responding to space, with reference to Charles Dickens’s The Uncommercial Traveller. The whole thing is part of the Dickens 2012 programme. Why Dickens 2012? The great writer was born in 1812. This is his 200th year anniversary. It’s kind of a big deal.

So far, there have been screenings of adaptations of his novels and a 24-hour read-a-thon where excerpts of his various books were read out by people in 24 countries (each country was allotted a five-minute slot in the hour) on February 7, his birthday. In fact, more of what you would expect for a celebration of Dickens and his works.

The Uncommercial Traveller is something a little different. The text is one of his more obscure. And as Anna Dever, project director of Dickens 2012 points out, it is taken as a leaping off point rather than a hard and fast guide.

“For the Dickens 2012 programme, we wanted to reinvent the idea of heritage and reimagine quite a classical figure and try to think how he would relate to a contemporary audience. We were quite keen to invent different strands of the project that toyed with certain skills that you have and ideas you use.

"With this one in particular, we were not looking at Dickens’s style of writing which is very dense and detailed and a massive skill but rather, the way he could go through the streets of London and places he’d never been before, places other people might not recognise or may just walk past, like a dusty alleyway and go in there and respond to it.”

What the project wants to do, from Karachi to Melbourne to Singapore to Georgetown, is in fact, trigger a sense of curiosity about space and responding to these spaces in a non-traditional way.

The idea for incorporating this non-traditional aspect of Dickens into the Dickens 2012 project came about when Dever saw a version Uncommercial Traveller performed by immersive theatre groups Punchdrunk and Arcola in London. “I thought it was fantastic and it was split in two halves. The first part was this audio journey where you plugged in your iPod and downloaded these voices and they showed you around these different places in London.

“The second part was the end of the performance where you ended up in a Victorian soup kitchen. You were showed in and put next to a random performer who was in Victorian costume and sitting before his bowl of soup. This performer would interact with you. They’d immerse you in their story and their journey. So it’s really this idea of wandering somewhere you hadn’t been and being guided by somebody. I just thought it would be so interesting to take that to different cities.”

Basically, what they are creating is known as “immersive theatre” which is the latest thing in performance. What is immersive theatre? “It is a really interesting contemporary theatre model which blurs the line between what’s real and what isn’t. The audience does not sit down and absorb the performance but is very much a fellow performer. Your experience is the show and how you respond to it.”

The interview with Dever is being conducted at China House, a café rich in puddings with a particular penchant for salted caramel, which is apparently, the latest fad in deserts in the UK. Then the theatre people drop in for lunch in between sessions with the students.

Raquel Meseguer is a project director for Uncommercial Traveler. She’s been a performer, a choreographer and an assistant director with Punchdrunk, but like any bona fide artist, is not quite sure what her actual designation with Punchdrunk is.

It’s Day 3 and she has been working flat out with the students to get them to interact with spaces in a whole new way. Like Dickens. “They’re writing and going over their routes and writing again. They’re really being pushed.”

Dobbie, the sound and graphics designer, agrees: “They are taking on a lot of new stuff; new ways of working, new ways of thinking.”

But just how does Dickens figure into all this? Meseguer points out that he doesn’t, not directly, not in terms of the actual text. It’s more a way of seeing. “That is the approach, the technique; to rediscover places, to see things in a different angle, in a different light. So it’s taking his approach and using it with a group of students in a contemporary way in a new place.”

Basically Dickens was an insomniac. The Uncommercial Traveller was a series of articles born of his restless night wanderings. He was especially interested in the hidden spaces, the underbelly of life, and the characters who inhabited these places.

Have the students read Dickens? Are they familiar with his work and how he writes?
That, as Dobbie points out, is beside the point. “In so many ways, it’s not about referencing and being aware of the text. This whole project is about drawing out his approach and going to those places. We’re not asking them to write in the style of Dickens or set their journey in the Dickensian era.

Meseguer agrees: “No, it’s very much contemporary. It’s very much a ‘here and now’ snapshot.”

Straight ahead past the red Penang culture house with the broken and abandoned furniture. The building holds a lot of sad memories. Uncle Tan, who lives around here, stands topless in his shorts, throwing orange peel into the gutter as he whistles. He throws his luck away as his wife calls him into the house.

Dobbie adds: It’s a personal response to an environment, like Raquel said, a period of time.”

Bryn Jones, director with Arcola Theatre expands upon the idea: “We’re interested in looking at the things that we’ve been encouraged not to look at, or perhaps, that we prefer not to look at. We engage with them, reflect upon them and mix them with our creative imaginings and create new and original perspectives of familiar places.

“And from there, you discover what unfolds, what occurs in those explorations and excavations and what you unearth. Then you have the whole logistical thing because at the end of the day they have to come up with a piece of work, 10 minutes of audio that people have to be able to download to their MP3 players, plug in and do the actual journey.

"It has to work for those people to be guided and orientated through that space. It has to be timed so they’re travelling and what’s being said keys in to the moment-by-moment environmental journey through the space. And it also has to work for somebody listening to it in Karachi or Melbourne or Toronto, online or in their bedroom. It has to have a kind of internal life as well as external life. So there’s an awful lot of really complex components to bring together in one piece of work. In the traditions of Punchdrunk and Arcola, it’s truly intensive, it’s truly immersive as a piece of theatre, as a process."

And the band plays on: “A lorong belakang. Yes, you have arrived. Looks like nothing much happens here. The large tree offers natural shelter. Walk there and lean your back against the close shuttered doors. Hmmm…nothing to see. The branches of the tree keep the heat away and there is an old abandoned building in front of you. Walls, sounds of water, trees are growing out from that building.

“Notice the crack on the wall? Move forward and peek inside. It is dark and lonely, a cold breath on your face. Smells of dust and old brick. Lean against the wall and allow the wall to lean against you. But be careful! The wall is falling.”

Dolly Varden

Victorian readers were quite taken by the spoiled, coquettish daughter of the honest locksmith, Gabriel Varden. According to Vanda Foster and Richard Dunn in the Dickensian, Dolly inspired songs, dances, paintings, 'the Dolly Varden look' in ladies' fashion in the 1870's, and lending her name to a hat style, a spotted calico material, a species of trout, a variety of horse and the buffer on a railway tender.

William P. Frith's famous painting of Dolly Varden, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, was taken from the description given in chapter 19 of Barnaby Rudge:

"As to Dolly, there she was again, the very pink and pattern of good looks, in a smart little cherry-coloured mantle, with a hood of the same drawn over her head, and upon the top of that hood, a little straw hat trimmed with cherry-coloured ribbons, and worn the merest trifle on one side-just enough in short to make it the wickedest and most provoking head-dress that ever malicious milliner devised."

Crime and Punishment

You know what I most love about Dickens? The fact that he is so Sidney-esque, Philip Sidneyesque that is. The good are rewarded. The evil are punished. Although sometimes the pathetic die. I mean like Smike. Although I do not see how Smike could have lived...he loved Kate and Kate loved Frank Cheeryble. So he had to die. And Dora had to die too, or there couldn't have been a happy ending with Agnes.

So complicated.

But other than that...when I find a character particularly noxious, I can be glad that he/she is going to come to an untoward end.

And as he does not have Hardy's morality, he doesn't punish the "fallen" women by killing them or worse. (I think Hardy's Jude the Obscure punishment was worse than mere death).

So, I'm still in the first few pages of Barnaby. I haven't advanced as much as I would like, though it is by no means boring. Only, it doesn't grip me the way David Copperfield did. (although it makes an honest effort to)

Also, last night I was at Backyard till late...so I was too tired to read more than a few lines before succumbing to the comforting dark.

Whatever it is, I push gamely on...14 or is it 15 books by this time next year.

That shouldn't be too hard, don't you think?

And I get so much from a Dickens' book. It feels like nourishment.

I didn't get this from George Martin, fascinating as he was. I prefer gentler books, where language is wielded as a weapon. Not horror. Not gratuitous violence. Not Sir Gregor Clegane.

One Step Enough For Me

Well I finished David Copperfield. It was so engrossing that I started to neglect all the stuff I was supposed to do, disappearing to the nearest Starbucks to read yet another few chapters.

As it is supposed to be loosely based on his life, I got the impression that Dora was a version of his wife, Catherine (God only knows who Agnes was supposed to represent, knowing Dickens it would have been his idealised woman, one who did not exist) and the perfect solution (for him, at least) would have been for her to expire away after her first childbirth.

Maybe I'm being unfair. After all, he did go on to have 10 children with her. After 10, he dumped her and took up with Ellen Ternan. Who surprisingly, did not resemble any of his "ideal" women, not Kate Nickleby, not Agnes Wickfield, (I don't seem to be able to remember any of the other perfect women he peppered his narratives with).

But I loved David Copperfield, nonetheless. I found it tremendously exciting, by degrees sad, by degrees hilarious...I couldn't understand why David kept loving that horrible Steerforth, right to the end when he had ruined that family and caused the death of at least one of them. I couldn't understand why he allowed Rosa Dartle to get away with the chastisement (maybe the chastisement was the point) of Little Em'ly. And I wondered what Martha did because it was never actually explained. Just that she was a bad girl and fallen woman.

Anyway, so I'm done with DC and have picked up my next Dickens - Barnaby Rudge. It's political, although I'm only at the beginning, and politics hasn't entered into it, only mystery. I remember that the person I interviewed about Dickens in Penang (I don't want to write her name here) said this was the one Dickens text she was saving for her deathbed...and this was the text they gave to Greece to read for the read-a-thon, because the Greeks had insisted on a political novel. (By the bye, A Tale of Two Cities would be the better known political novel).

There were shades of politics in David Copperfield, especially towards the end when David is inspecting a prison run by his former cruel headmaster Creakle, who used to beat the stuffing out of the boys (except for Steerforth, because he was rich) but who treated the prisoners with kid gloves and especially honoured the two who were the most hypocritical - Uriah Heep and Litimer.

Uriah Heep...I was glad that things didn't come to a pass between him and Agnes...that though he looked and expressed interest, things hadn't progressed to more than that between him and Agnes. From Dickens's disgust at the character he had created, I guess they wouldn't have been. And he did attempt some sort of an explanation for him...although I think he hated him more for being ugly and awkward (those eel-like wriggles) than for being a hypocrite. But maybe, that's me.

I liked Dickens's introduction to Barnaby Rudge, where he talked about his two ravens...I love his humorous descriptions...and I shall include it here at some point.

Today, however, I have to get back to the story I am supposed to be writing about the fallout from the euro debt crisis...which is not very Dickensian, although it might be Lewisian (I'm thinking Boomerang).

So I leave you with the following words of a hymn (not quite Dickens, but I'm sure it was one he heard during his time as well).

Keep thou my feet,
I do not ask to see,
The distant scene
One step enough for me....

A Year With Dickens

It's been more than a month since I completed my last one-year project, writing a happy post, or a happiness-inspiring post, or excerpting something from a book, or posting a video that inspires joy and I'm ripe for my new one-year project.

I thought that since it was Dickens's 200th anniversary, or as they say in Hollywood, Dickens 2012, I would spend this year, or well, the next 365 days, reading all of Dickens, the famous books the not-so-famous books.

I thought I would start with his early work, and then I decided heck it, I'll just meander through anyhow. At first I thought Bleak House would be a good place to start. Except that I couldn't seem to find it. I mean, not in bookstores in Malaysia, anyway.

So I decided to start with David Copperfield. Most Dickens aficionados are surprised that I haven't read it yet. I can only blame the fact that I picked up an abridged version and it skipped all the humour and got dire very quickly. So I always thought of David Copperfield as a terribly sad book. And most of the time, I was not in the mood to read a heart-wearying bildungsroman.

Then I interviewed the Dickens 2012 girl for a story and this was the first book her father read to her. And she absolutely loved it. What did I love, she asked? Oh, Pickwick Papers. And A Christmas Carol. They were both indulgences. Pleasures to be savoured and re-read.

And then I picked up David Copperfield at a Borders and sat down in one of those leather armchairs to read. Oh boy! I started giggling, then chuckling, the snorting with laughter. Esther, who was seated next to me looked up:

"So funny ah?"

I couldn't believe it. I had dragged my feet to read this book?

Of course, the funny bits stopped as soon as Mr Murdstone came into the picture with all the authority and cruelty of a fairy tale stepfather. But still, even when things are dire, Dickens's humour creeps in.

So anyway, I'm on page 112 and I see there are more than 900 pages in this book.

Just now, I went to Borders for a hot chocolate and classic doughnut and I brought the newspaper along with me to read. Instead, I went and dug out a David Copperfield from Borders (I had purposely not brought my copy along so I wouldn't waste office time reading it) and read it to my heart's content. Or nearly my heart's content. I mean, I had to break off, after all, to come back and finish my piece for the week.

And guess what? I did. I finished it. I mean, yay me! And this means I will go home and read some more of it.

I don't like Steerforth.

But then, I guess I'm not supposed to.