Nicholas Nickleby, A Most Wanted Man

I recently finished listening to Nicholas Nickleby and finished reading le Carre's A Most Wanted Man.

I decided to give Nicholas Nickleby a try because I didn't like Dickens back in high school, and I thought it was worth giving him another shot. I chose Nicholas Nickleby more-or-less at random, but it turned out to be a fantastic choice. It displayed all of Dickens's great strengths, as well as his typical faults, and I finally got over my dislike of Dickens.

Dickens's faults, I think, fall into two categories -- those that come about because he's writing in an episodic manner and those that are inherent to all his writing. In the former category you have things like the incredible coincidences he sometimes resorts to in order to get his plot back on course -- it's amazing how often the same group of 10 people keep randomly falling over each other in London. On a related note, he needs to sometimes pull props out of his hat (like the secret letter that reveals that heroine of the story is actually a rich heiress), because he wants to end the story now and doesn't have another way for her to end up with money. Finally, there are episodes that go nowhere, like when he has all the characters sit around the fire swapping old legends for two chapters -- I think he just didn't know what to do with them yet, and was sort of vamping until inspiration could strike.

In the latter category, faults that are inherent to his writing, I'd have to say that he paints his characters with a very broad brush. You instantly know who's good and bad, and people almost never switch from one side to the other. I know some people would put the sentimentality in here, but Nicholas Nickleby doesn't really display that side of Dickens's writing very much, so I'll have to reserve judgment.

Although these faults should be pretty damning, I found myself tremendously enjoying the book anwyay. For one thing, Dickens's wit carried me through a lot of spots where the plot was running thin. For instance, when Nicholas tries to get a job as a politician's secretary, the job's duties were very funny. The long sequence where Nicholas joins an acting troupe was very funny, even as though it ended up having a negligible effect on the plot.

And that brings me to Dickens's other great strength -- the interaction between the characters. Although the characters themselves are painted with a broad brush (the simple farmer, the nasty schoolmaster, the simpleton, etc), Dickens puts them through endlessly entertaining combinations, playing them off against each other. So even though, say, Nicholas and John the farmer are not very interesting in themselves, their scenes together are great. Throw the schoolmaster and his daughter into the scene and you end up with a great set-piece.

All in all, I think I'll be reading more Dickens in the near future.

Unfortunately, I can't be saying the same about John Le Carre. After my disappointment with a couple of his books several years ago, I relunctantly took him off my reading list. Then a recent review in The New York Times Book Review said that A Most Wanted Man was le Carre's return to his writing style in the good old days, so I decided to give it a try.

Normally, le Carre's strengths are the inverse of Dickens's weaknesses I talked about above. His best novels have intricate plots (but never overwhelming) with well-wrought characters acting in them. (Aside from the obvious George Smiley, think of the main characters in The Looking Glass War or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold). Sadly, A Most Wanted Man had neither.

The set-up is promising enough -- a young Chechnyan man sneaks into Germany, claiming to be the heir to a fortune in money stashed in a bank. The secret services clash, undecided over whether to arrest him immediately or use him to track down Muslim extremists. And is this young man what he seems to be?

Unfortunately, the whole work ends up being driven by le Carre's ideological cause du jour. In this case, he wants to tackle anti-immigrant feeling, and so he loses sight of the two sides of the question. Even though I agree with le Carre's viewpoint, he used to be better at acknowledging that there are two sides to every important policy debate, and the knaves and fools aren't all on one side with the angels on the other. His earlier novels derive their power from characters being forced to sacrifice one principle to uphold another, and from le Carre's implicitly asking whether the game is worth the candle.

Secondly, his anti-Americanism completely ruins the ending. He introduces a CIA officer late in the game who makes Dick Cheney look like a moderate and who ends up driving all the action. His anti-Americanism has always been there -- the "Cousins" in the earlier novels are depicted as gadet-happy, without the subtley that MI5 prides itself on. But this worked better when the Americans were off-stage, affecting the story by their presence but never entering directly.