Bleak House (original 1853; edition 2010)

It feels unnecessary to review Bleak House - Dickens' smoky and foggy masterpiece of the city, the law and deception. We all know about the outsized characters and Dickens' peculiar inability to write about good women. We know about the london fog and the despair of the law courts; the crushing weight of aristocracy and guilt. But what struck me this time round were the incidental pleasures - the depiction of a world teetering on the edge of modernity, an extraordinarily vivid portrait of the coming of the train into a rural landscape; the fall of footsteps on a ghostly walk; the decayed remnants of a useless aristocracy. Dickens should be read in a hurry, but also in detail, and richness abounds that way

One of my all time favourites. Loved it.

© Koplowitz 2011

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I remember basically nothing about this book other than that I read it when I was extremely bored at my Nan's house. I might reread it at some point. ( )

I am not much of a Dickens fan. I do find some moments in his writing beautiful and poetic, but those moments are buried under far too many mundane descriptions. Bleak House, I suspect, is one of his better works (amongst the long novels). I enjoyed Esther's narrative and other bits and pieces told from a character's perspective, but the many sections where there is a more objective third person narrator describing the scenery or providing background detail falls flat, causing my mind to glaze over. I loved the story of the Ghost walk as told by the housekeeper and, in chapter 36, thought the scene depicting Esther's nocturnal wanderings of Chesney Wold and her sudden realization that she was the means that would bring about the predicted calamity while she was creating the the foreboding, echoing footsteps on the Ghost Walk was brilliant.

Dickens, being Dickens, creates many wonderful characters and populates this novel with many many others as well. Unfortunately, all of them are important and all have their role to play in the resolution of Esther's narrative and you have to keep track of every single one, no matter how two-dimensional and cardboard in order to follow the various revelations. (I somehow never really figured out the difference between Krook, Snagsby, Smallweed and when & how we met them and when and how they obtained their various pieces of the puzzle) and also tended to confuse George and whats-his-face's storyline as well. So, overall, what others might call well-crafted, I call contrived. And others may praise his skill at tying-up all the loose ends, but I consider it to be too-tidy, a kind of Stepford-like neatness. Furthermore, the end of Esther's story (or rather the means of procuring it) made me quite irate. Irate enough to knock off a star. ( )

to be fair, i skimmed at least 40% of this book. but i just found so much of it to be completely superfluous; the entire thing could have been written, without loss, in like 250 pages. i guess his long-windedness allows him to talk about some things that i'm glad he put in - like poverty, homelessness, domestic violence - but i might have taken 4 months to read this if i didn't skim it like i did. ( )