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....