Wives and Daughters

Elizabeth Gaskell's final novel, Wives and Daughters, reminded me more than a little of George Elliot's writing, particularly Middlemarch.  It's set some time before her present, unlike her more contemporary novels (such as North and South), which tend to focus on the effects of industrialization.  Also like Middlemarch, Wives and Daughters follows the intertwined fortunes of three families within a small area.  Since I loved Middlemarch, this resemblance is not a bad thing.

Gaskell's hand is a little heavier than Elliot's, particularly with Mrs. Gibson, the least sympathetic character of the piece.  But, on the whole, the novel has a lot of solid characters, all well-delineated.  I think Cynthia the most interesting character, always on the verge of disgrace yet still sympathetic.

A Tale of Two Cities

Tale of Two Cities is another of my re-read attempts that I engage in from time to time.  I remember liking the book waaay back in 9th grade, but how would it hold up 30 years later?

It was fantastic.  I'll admit that I was crying at the end.  The writing is beautiful all the way through.  The book is less digressive than most of the other Dickens that I've read; the plot is a fairly straight arc, without a lot of venturing into narrative cul-de-sacs.

Cranford

Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford reads like a series of vignettes.  Originally published as a series of short stories in Charles Dickens' magazine, it's hard to even call some of them short stories.  Rather, they're sketches of life in the little town of Cranford, among the shabbily genteel spinsters of the town.

It's a humorous collection with some deeper under-currents, particularly about the way the social structure is changing right under people's feet, but the whole thing feels a bit slight to me.  There's a deep gap between Gaskell's finely drawn characters in North and South and the broader caricatures on display here.  Here, the "disappointing" label is apropos; it's not so much that this is a bad book as that I'd been hoping for better.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one I can talk about without worrying whether I'm giving anything away.  For better or for worse, we all come to this novel already knowing what the twist ending is going to be, which is a bit of a pity.

I tried to read it with blinders on, as if this were a new novel I'd never heard of, which is a difficult thing to do.  The first thing that becomes apparent is that (as the title implies), Stevenson has structured the story something like a mystery novel, in which we don't know the connection between Jekyll and Hyde until the last pages.  On the other hand, a reader can never penetrate the mystery unless he already knows the answer -- there's no rational answer to be found in the text.

And I think that's ultimately part of what drives this story -- the limits of rationality.  Jekyll's rationality holds Hyde in check (as our rationality holds our internal Hydes in check), but cannot kill him.  Further, although we see Jekyll's evil side in Hyde, we never see a wholly good side.  For dramatic purposes, perhaps, a wholly good character is not so interesting, but there are probably ways around that.  Rather, I think that it's an essential part of the somewhat pessimistic point of view of the story; although an evil side can exist by itself, it's not really clear what a completely good side would even look like.  The Jekyll/Hyde dichotomy is not so much good/evil as it is rational/evil.  And yet it's Jekyll's rationality that leads him to freeing Hyde.

For such a short book, there's a lot to think about packed into its pages.

Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist was one of the first books by Dickens that I read, back in the day.  I should say, started to read, because I couldn't get more than halfway through before giving up.  But in the past couple of years, I've read and enjoyed a few books by Dickens, so I figured I'd give it another try.

I know that Oliver Twist is one of Dickens' best-loved books, but for the life of me I don't see why.  It's not a terrible book, but I felt like it has neither the depth of, say, Great Expectations or the humor of Nicholas Nickleby.  I will say that the penultimate chapter (Fagin's last day on Earth) is very good.  But that's balanced out by the fact that Oliver himself is a cipher, the love story (such as it is) is boring, and the good guys are generally interchangeable.

I'm leaving out the standard Dickens faults, like the extended use of coincidence, because I like the other novels even though they're just as bad on that front.

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White is absolutely amazing so far (2/3 of the way through).  I've known for a long time that Collins is the "other" Victorian popular writer (he was Dickens's rival), but, although I've read a fair amount of Dickens, I never got round to reading Collins.

I decided to take a chance on it when audible was doing a 3-for-2 deal, and I wanted the other two anyway, and I started this book expecting not to be so impressed, but I was very wrong.  The novel starts out a bit slowly, but within an hour I was hugely enjoying it. First off, Marian Halcombe is one of the best female characters I've run into by a male Victorian writers.  She's more interesting than just about Dickens female, not to mention Henry James's Isabel Archer.  She's funny, opinionated, and bold, and I enjoyed her diary section very much.

Which brings me to the second thing I'm enjoying.  Collins has a different character narrate each section of the novel, each with a different voice -- this is something I expect more out of modernist fiction than the Victorians, and I was pleasantly surprised.  Given a paragraph by any of these characters, one could immediately assign it to the right one.  (Granted, some of them, like the housekeeper are more of a type than a character, but others are really well done).

Third, I'm finding the novel suspenseful, even though it should by rights be pretty creaky stuff by now.  The Woman in White is one of the earliest suspense novels, and the whispered conversations, conniving husband, mysterious foreigner, etc, should are all rather old hat.  And yet...  I found myself wanting to play some sections at double speed so that I could find out the resolution (though I've managed to resist so far).

Of course, the novel has its faults, in particular the villains who are pretty much a type.  Although the villainous Italian count is an interesting enough schemer that he's fun to read about anyway.

North and South concluded

Continuing my thoughts from here...
I finished North and South yesterday, and it doesn't conclude as well as I had hoped.

I think part of the problem is that the structure of the novel is a bit intractable for moving toward a conclusion.  Given how relations between unions and managers played out in real life, there's no realistic way to resolve Thornton's union issues within the relatively short span of the novel (a few years).  So we end up with Thornton's advocating a kind of quasi-socialism (or possibly an enlightened feudalism), in which laborers and capitalists each realize that both sides have things to offer, and that without the hard work of both sides the income stream would dry up.

Against this utopianism, though, Gaskell sets a clear-eyed vision of the present.  Thornton's uprightness leads him into bankruptcy; Frederick's situation is never resolved successfully; in contrast with, say, Dickens, major characters sometimes simply keel over and die, with no dramatic fanfare.

Certainly, I feel this work deserves to better-known.  It may not be as good as the best of Dickens, but I think it is easily as good as the Trollope I've read.

North and South

As an American, it's hard to look at the title of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South and not think of the American Civil War.  But the North and South of her title refer respectively to England's North (with its mill towns) and South (London and its environs).

In addition, the title tells us that this novel is a study in contrasts and in the conflicts that stem from them.  So we get an opposition of

• town and country
• unions and manufacturers
• nobility and nouveau riche
• rich and poor (different from the above)
• violence and civil disobedience

Gaskell sets up characters who exemplify their different classes, with their legitimate grievances, and then lets us watch them in action.  I don't mean that her characters are simple cardboard cut-outs representing workers or manufacturers, but, rather, that she gives makes them all people acting with good motives.  So she has, in Thornton, a principled capitalist who believes that if he pays his workers too much, he will be undercut by his competitors; in many ways, he reminds me of a modern libertarian.  She has, in Higgins, a union man who believes that, if men are not coerced to join the union, it will lose all its strength.

I'm not done with the novel yet, but it will be interesting to see how (if) she resolves the various conflicts that she's set up.

One side note: I think it's an unfortunate sign of Austen-mania that a lot of the reviews on amazon say something like "this is Pride and Prejudice with social awareness" or "like Jane Austen with a conscience."  Really, I think Gaskell has no more in common with Austen than does, say George Elliot.

Vicious Circle, The Warden

Mike Carey's Vicious Circle is the second Felix Castor novel.  I really enjoyed the first one; I felt like it was probably the most successful blend of hard-boiled detective story and fantasy novel that I've run across.  Vicious Circle is the same, only more so.  Carey intertwines the two genres so thoroughly that it's impossible to even say which one is primary.  It's also a surprisingly down-beat novel, with Felix forced into betraying a friend, losing another friend, and ending up in a worse place than where he started.

I wish I had more to say about this novel, because it was such a fine book (if not particularly deep).  Carey has a great ear for similes and metaphors, his plotting is deft, and his fantasy universe hangs together really well.  It's always easier to complain than to think of nice things to say, I suppose.


I've decided to give Trollope's Barset Chronicles a shot, and I've been told that you really need to read them in order, so I started with The Warden, the story of the warden of a hospital who begins to doubt whether the money he's earning is properly his, or whether it belongs to inmates of the hospital.  I enjoyed it, but it's a pretty slight story (by Dickensian standards it's almost a short story).  I'm looking forward to the next book, which is considered one of Trollope's greater works.