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?
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