I've resolved this year to read all the canonical books I've been too lazy to read up till now (and that's a lot of books). Perhaps the most glaring omission has been Dickens, who I have wilfully and shamefully avoided my whole life.
Anyway, I've recently finished reading David Copperfield. A lot of people (including geniuses like Dostoevsky and Kafka) rate this as a great work of literature. Dickens himself apparently thought it his best novel.
As far as I can see, these are the main pros and cons:
Pro
- Occasionally vivid (e.g. Chapter 55, "Tempest") and always economical narration;
- An excellent ear for language, dialect and discourse: every communication (verbal or written) between characters is instantly believable.
Con
- A plot so contrived as to be laughable. There are very few incidental characters, no passing attachments, very little background noise or colour beyond the main action. It's as if the hero lives in a bubble with about ten other people, all of whom collide with each other endlessly to the exclusion of the rest of the world. When Dickens is wrapping things up at the end, having DC's former schoolmaster conduct him on a tour of a prison containing two other previously unconnected characters in adjacent cells, I'm sure he must be taking the piss. All the exactitude and realism of the narrative style is undermined by the author's obvious obsession with knitting every last yarn of plot into a ball so tight it is only six inches across, yet weighs more than Saturn;
- Characters which are cardboard cutouts. Hardly any (the hero, his aunt) have any moral nuance. There is more subtlety of motive in a pantomime. Very few people are all good or all bad, yet in Copperfield very few are anything but. Even the narrator confesses his failings as in a job interview - "I was wrong then but I've seen the light now". By the end, the implication is, he's perfect, the natural end-product of a perfectly-plotted Bildungsroman.
I've got nothing against transparent characters and plots, but in conjunction with what seems to be a genuine desire in the narrrative style to show things as they are, they make no sense. It's almost as if there's one person in charge of the writing and another, with diametrically opposed views on art, supervising the book's structure.
Anyhow, I just can't see why it's regarded as a masterpiece. Can any of you lot see something I can't or maybe show me where I'm going wrong?
Should I read any more Dickens or give it up until I've read everything else? Just what's so great about David Copperfield?
And did he really make the Statue of Liberty disappear?
David Copperfield
Just what's so great about David Copperfield?
Nothing. Maybe the fact that people loved it so much at the time shows how much of its time it was - and consequently how dated it seems now. I think also it was an act of exorcism for CD - (CD? DC? You see?) - that was his unhappy childhood in there, reader.
However, try Pickwick Papers - you'll laugh out loud, honest. Or, for something less episodic, and more powerful (but nowhere near as funny, although it's not without humour) - Bleak House. That is the real hard stuff.
Have they shown the BBC adaptation of BH over there, with Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock? So good it's almost worth not reading the book beforehand. But you know you should.
Enjoy! Really, you will.
David
Nothing. Maybe the fact that people loved it so much at the time shows how much of its time it was - and consequently how dated it seems now. I think also it was an act of exorcism for CD - (CD? DC? You see?) - that was his unhappy childhood in there, reader.
However, try Pickwick Papers - you'll laugh out loud, honest. Or, for something less episodic, and more powerful (but nowhere near as funny, although it's not without humour) - Bleak House. That is the real hard stuff.
Have they shown the BBC adaptation of BH over there, with Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock? So good it's almost worth not reading the book beforehand. But you know you should.
Enjoy! Really, you will.
David
Thanks David. It's good to know I'm not alone in my disappointment in Copperfield. The autobiographical aspect doesn't excuse any of its faults, though. In January I read Of Human Bondage, which is much closer to its author's life than David Copperfield is, yet practically flawless (IMO) as a novel.
I will definitely read the two you suggest.
If that adaptation of Bleak House is as good as you say, then it probably won't be shown here. We only get shite on TV here.
I will definitely read the two you suggest.
If that adaptation of Bleak House is as good as you say, then it probably won't be shown here. We only get shite on TV here.