I liked this book in a not especially passionate way. Its scenes are pleasingly quotidian and feel like an authentic representation of literary life in London during the 1950s. The plot strikes a good balance between the mundane realities of day to day life and the necessity to include some events of a more exceptional character to drive the narrative. These events were well chosen and not overly far-fetched or ostentatious. Almost all of them relate to a character called Hector Bartlett, the boyfriend / hanger on of a more famous writer, who tries to persuade the protagonist, Nancy Hawkins, who works at a publisher, to accept his essays or make introduction to otherwise further his career. Nancy dislikes Hector immensely and calls him a ‘pissuer de copie’ on two occassions, both of which cause her to lose her job. In fact, the first time she loses her job it might be because the publisher went bust. I can’t remember. However, she definitely uses the insult twice and it causes much consternation in both cases hence my confusion. After this, when Nancy is working at her third job of the novel, one of her fellow inmates from their rooming house in South Kensington commits suicide. After going through the deceased woman’s effect and ruminating on the subject with the rooming house owner, Nancy discovers that Hector may have had some part in this suicide by seducing the woman in question and persuading her to operate a ‘box’ used in the psuedoscience of radionics. The woman was chosen because of her proximity to Nancy because Hector wants to use the box to adversely affect her. Hector later corroborates this in an article he writes about the experience for a radionics journal. Nothing much comes of this as none of her evidence is conclusive and I like the way the author avoided the temptation to make the book into a hunt to bring him to justice. After these excitements, Nancy sleeps with another fellow inmate from the rooming house, starts dating him and then they both move out and get married.
As I mentioned before, I liked the tone of the narrative and felt like it struck a good balance between plausibility and intrigue while avoiding the temptation to use the narrative to make the book more sensational. I also liked some of the bits and pieces that were used to construct the book, especially the radionics and the centrality to the plot of the excellent phrase ‘pissuer de copie’. Taken as a whole, the book is a blatant piece of self-promotion by the protagonist and there was a pleasing uncertainty lingering around the credibility of the account, which I enjoyed. I didn’t feel like the characters were really strong and none of them left a strong impression after I finished the book. Perhaps this is because the book is only 180 pages or so and it’s harder to develop characters in this format versus, say, an 800 page Dickens book spanning a decade or two. I also wasn’t wild about the setting for the book. I feel like I read a disproportionate number of books about the literary world, maybe for obvious reasons, and because of this the genre feels a bit overused to me. By the same token, perhaps it is a little churlish to praise a book for its ambience of reality and then criticise the author for writing about a subject they are familiar with. The prose was one of the best aspects of the book. It was clear and concise with occasional flourishes but not of a floral or pretentious kind. I enjoyed reading it and felt it was well paced and skillfully constructed.
Overall this wasn’t a book I would rave about or necessarily recommend widely. However, it was an enjoyable and well crafted novel that was a pleasure to read. It did make me want to read more Muriel Spark so perhaps I’m undervaluing it!
Monday 30 March 2020
Thursday 26 March 2020
Charles Dickens - Dombey & Son
This is the first Dickens book I’ve read since I was a child and I’m not sure why I chose it beyond the facts that it was on my shelf and I’ve been meaning to read some Dickens for a while. I’ve forgotten where I bought the book but I have vague recollections of being recommended it and writing the name down on one of my many lists of books. The copy I acquired is a 1995 Wordsworth Classics edition with yellowed pages so my suggestions from the previous sentence might be a fabrication and I might have simply bought it at a second hand book shop on a whim. Was it a worthwhile whim? Read on to find out!
Attempting to summarise the plot of Dombey & Son is a daunting prospect. Not least because the book is 769 pages of closely printed, single spaced text. Dombey is the fabulously wealthy principle of a venerated trading house in the city of London much enthrall to dynastic ideas and the concept of primogeniture. He is married and his wife has born him a daughter whom he overlooks in expectations of a son whom he can interest in his true passions of business, money and succession in the Dombey dynasty. A son is born, but his wife dies in the process and the two children are mainly brought up by servants while Dombey Snr. remains distant and concerns himself with business.
Another strand of the story, running parallel to this narrative, has its epicentre in a small navigational instrument shop near the docklands in London. This establishment, with an exceptionally snug back parlour, is occupied by Sol Gills and his nephew Walter and often attended by Captain Cuttle, an old friend of the family and former sailor. Young Walter has just begun working as a lowly junior at the House of Dombey thus providing a tenuous link between the two seemingly disparate worlds. The link is strengthened when Dombey’s daughter, Florence, goes out with her maid, gets lost and is robbed by an old beggar woman. Running through the streets crying in the docklands near the offices of Dombey & Son, Florence is found by Walter who takes her back to his uncle’s shop before finding out who she is and taking her back home. Meanwhile, Dombey’s son Paul is in poor health and moves to Brighton for school taking his sister with him. The two develop a strong bond but Paul eventually dies prematurely and Florence returns to live in mourning at her gloomy father’s house in London.
During this time, Walter has been sent to the Caribbean by Dombey & Sons, which breaks his Uncle Sol’s heart. It generally feels like Dombey has done him a disservice after Walter helped rescue his daughter. Furthermore, Dombey’s dead son Paul asked him to look after Walter on his deathbed, which by sending him on a dangerous voyage to the Caribbean he has failed to do. Dombey is portrayed up to this point as a deeply proud man with little time or consideration for other people.
In the aftermath of his son’s death, Dombey goes travelling around with his friend Major Bagstock, a wonderful, blustering, retired colonial military man with bulging eyes and a red face. The character of Bagstock is the comic highlight of the book and is a classic, braying military bore! He specialises in professions of his own toughness, a dazzling array of self-appointed nicknames and looking like a lobster. While in Leamington Spa, Dombey meets an equally proud and haughty widow being chaperoned by her mother, Mrs Skewton, who is an old flame of Major Bagstock’s but now a somewhat wilted rose. There are some excellent scenes between Bagstock and ‘his Cleopatra’ but sadly her filial relationship is far frostier.
After a passionless courtship, Dombey and Edith are engaged to be married but there is no love between them. Edith feels like her mother has ruined her life by making the sole purpose of her life attracting a rich husband and that she has now suffered the final insult by essentially assenting to be sold in a transaction. Relations between her and Dombey start badly and deteriorate quickly. Edith does, however, fall completely in love with Florence and this is a happy period in her sad history of neglect at the hands of her father. Dombey tells his new wife that he is unhappy with her aloof behaviour and does want her to show affection for Florence while showing none towards him lest it should reflect poorly on him. Edith gets very upset about this and is further insulted when Dombey chooses to communicate with her only through his trusted lieutenant from the trading house, the feline Mr. Carker. Carker uses this position, and Edith’s fury about it, to gain her confidence, or so he thinks, and the two plan to elope. However, Mr. Carker is shown to be a cruel and selfish man through a side plot concerning the treatment of his brother and it turns out that he has other enemies from his past actions. These include a mother and daughter combo, Mrs Brown and Alice, not dissimilar to Edith and her mother, but at the opposite end of the social spectrum. While Edith and her faded society belle mother are well-to-do, albeit with limited means, the woman and her daughter are a beggar and a ex-convict recently returned from Australia. For all that, both mothers are obsessed with money and are despised by their daughters for it because they hold loftier principles. It turns out Alice, the daughter, was once a lover of Carker’s and was very badly treated by him. Carker involved her in an unnamed criminal enterprise and subsequently hung her out to dry when the conspiracy went awry resulting in her trip to Australia. Her sole aim in life now seems to be revenging herself on him.
In a rather convoluted, but pretty plausible, arrangement of affairs this couple obtain information from the wayward son of a former domestic worker in the Dombey household. This unfortunate lad, or ‘cove’ as he is wont to refer to himself, is the subject of Mr Dombey’s largesse when he receives a private education from him but fails academically and is bullied at school for being poor and by his old friends for his ridiculous school uniform. He leaves school and goes off the rails for a while before approaching Mr Carker for a job. Mr Carker sends him to be a spy with Captain Cuttle at the compass shop after Walter has been sent to the Caribbean and Uncle Sol has run away in his pursuit after hearing news that his ship was wrecked somewhere in the Caribbean. After completing this assignment he becomes Carker’s personal assistant and thus has knowledge of his elopement to France with Edith. Mrs Brown blackmails him to reveal the information while Dombey is hidden and Dombey uses this to pursue Carker. In the meantime, Edith turns on Carker while they are on the run in Dijon, reveals she really hates him and has used him and then disappears leaving Carker to flee, hotly pursued by Dombey. Carker leads a harried chase back to England but ends up getting run over by a train while physically running away from Dombey, who has finally caught up with him.
At this point the book becomes hurried, sentimental and pretty bad. Having proceeded at a very leisurely pace up to this point, including lengthy meanderings on topics like Paul’s schoolmates in Brighton to little narrative end, suddenly everything happens at once. Florence approaches her father to console him after Edith elopes with Carker but he reacts badly and hits her in the belief that she is siding with her stepmother. Florence is very badly shaken and runs away, ending up lodging with Captain Cuttle at the instrument shop while she recovers from the episode. Events then begin to take on the character of a children’s book where everything must have a happy and satisfactory ending. Florence and Walter are married, a prospect touted since their very first meeting, and have a child. Florence’s old servants return to dote on her once they have found her. As if one happy marriage is insufficient for the conclusion of the book, Dickens also marries Florence's maid, Susan, to a half-witted former schoolmate of Paul’s from Brighton on the basis that both of them are obsessed with Florence. The firm of Dombey & Sons goes bust once it has been revealed that Carker has been cooking the books and Dombey has to sell everything and grieve for the loss of his daughter. In another unlikely turn, Carker’s ill gotten inheritance goes to his siblings, who he treated very badly, who then return it to Dombey surreptitiously. After the passage of about a year or so, Dombey is reconciled with Florence and Walter, who now have two children, and goes to live with them and coo over his grandchildren; his character reformed and pride completely cured. The family is tended to by Susan, now Mrs Toots, both couples have children and all parties concerned are excessively happy. Edith too finds happiness as a recluse with her cousin and everybody is reconciled to everyone else. Even the dying Alice is nursed by Carker’s sister so that all loose ends are tied up in the fastest, most saccharine manner possible. I can also add that Alice is revealed to be Edith’s illegitimate cousin, which gives an accurate flavour of the book’s conclusion. It’s a really disappointing end to a book that promised much in its best sections and I ended up feeling a bit fed up and short changed by such a sloppy, facile denouement.
For me there were some great highlights of a remarkable variety. The half witted Mr Toots, his pugnacious sidekick ‘the game chicken’ and Major Bagstock are good comic characters. Carker’s flight from Dombey after Edith has left him is a wonderful description of an awful, heart pounding blur of fear and paranoia. There are several relationships that are skillfully described and developed, for example, Edith and her mother, Edith and Dombey, Florence and her father, Edith and Carker. Indeed, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the book was the diversity and intensity of these dysfunctional family relationships. There is also a good deal of narrative mystery relating to Walter’s shipwreck, Carker’s schemes, Carker’s siblings living in poverty and Alice’s return from Australia. However, in the end, perhaps the book was too varied and contained too many different strands forcing the hasty and shoddy ‘happily ever after’ at the end.
I think I would have preferred it if there wasn’t such a drastic change in pace at the end and that it wasn’t so universally happy and naive. It almost felt like a betrayal of the complexity that preceded it. It had the feeling of an author who’s tired of the characters and narratives they’d painstakingly created and decided to bring it all to a close as quickly and easily as possible.
This was an enjoyable read for the most part with some good narratives and great characters. However, the uneven pacing and the absurdly saccharine ending ruined it for me and drastically reduced the quality of the book when taken as a whole. I’m encouraged to read more Dickens but I hope all his endings aren’t so simplistic.
Attempting to summarise the plot of Dombey & Son is a daunting prospect. Not least because the book is 769 pages of closely printed, single spaced text. Dombey is the fabulously wealthy principle of a venerated trading house in the city of London much enthrall to dynastic ideas and the concept of primogeniture. He is married and his wife has born him a daughter whom he overlooks in expectations of a son whom he can interest in his true passions of business, money and succession in the Dombey dynasty. A son is born, but his wife dies in the process and the two children are mainly brought up by servants while Dombey Snr. remains distant and concerns himself with business.
Another strand of the story, running parallel to this narrative, has its epicentre in a small navigational instrument shop near the docklands in London. This establishment, with an exceptionally snug back parlour, is occupied by Sol Gills and his nephew Walter and often attended by Captain Cuttle, an old friend of the family and former sailor. Young Walter has just begun working as a lowly junior at the House of Dombey thus providing a tenuous link between the two seemingly disparate worlds. The link is strengthened when Dombey’s daughter, Florence, goes out with her maid, gets lost and is robbed by an old beggar woman. Running through the streets crying in the docklands near the offices of Dombey & Son, Florence is found by Walter who takes her back to his uncle’s shop before finding out who she is and taking her back home. Meanwhile, Dombey’s son Paul is in poor health and moves to Brighton for school taking his sister with him. The two develop a strong bond but Paul eventually dies prematurely and Florence returns to live in mourning at her gloomy father’s house in London.
During this time, Walter has been sent to the Caribbean by Dombey & Sons, which breaks his Uncle Sol’s heart. It generally feels like Dombey has done him a disservice after Walter helped rescue his daughter. Furthermore, Dombey’s dead son Paul asked him to look after Walter on his deathbed, which by sending him on a dangerous voyage to the Caribbean he has failed to do. Dombey is portrayed up to this point as a deeply proud man with little time or consideration for other people.
In the aftermath of his son’s death, Dombey goes travelling around with his friend Major Bagstock, a wonderful, blustering, retired colonial military man with bulging eyes and a red face. The character of Bagstock is the comic highlight of the book and is a classic, braying military bore! He specialises in professions of his own toughness, a dazzling array of self-appointed nicknames and looking like a lobster. While in Leamington Spa, Dombey meets an equally proud and haughty widow being chaperoned by her mother, Mrs Skewton, who is an old flame of Major Bagstock’s but now a somewhat wilted rose. There are some excellent scenes between Bagstock and ‘his Cleopatra’ but sadly her filial relationship is far frostier.
After a passionless courtship, Dombey and Edith are engaged to be married but there is no love between them. Edith feels like her mother has ruined her life by making the sole purpose of her life attracting a rich husband and that she has now suffered the final insult by essentially assenting to be sold in a transaction. Relations between her and Dombey start badly and deteriorate quickly. Edith does, however, fall completely in love with Florence and this is a happy period in her sad history of neglect at the hands of her father. Dombey tells his new wife that he is unhappy with her aloof behaviour and does want her to show affection for Florence while showing none towards him lest it should reflect poorly on him. Edith gets very upset about this and is further insulted when Dombey chooses to communicate with her only through his trusted lieutenant from the trading house, the feline Mr. Carker. Carker uses this position, and Edith’s fury about it, to gain her confidence, or so he thinks, and the two plan to elope. However, Mr. Carker is shown to be a cruel and selfish man through a side plot concerning the treatment of his brother and it turns out that he has other enemies from his past actions. These include a mother and daughter combo, Mrs Brown and Alice, not dissimilar to Edith and her mother, but at the opposite end of the social spectrum. While Edith and her faded society belle mother are well-to-do, albeit with limited means, the woman and her daughter are a beggar and a ex-convict recently returned from Australia. For all that, both mothers are obsessed with money and are despised by their daughters for it because they hold loftier principles. It turns out Alice, the daughter, was once a lover of Carker’s and was very badly treated by him. Carker involved her in an unnamed criminal enterprise and subsequently hung her out to dry when the conspiracy went awry resulting in her trip to Australia. Her sole aim in life now seems to be revenging herself on him.
In a rather convoluted, but pretty plausible, arrangement of affairs this couple obtain information from the wayward son of a former domestic worker in the Dombey household. This unfortunate lad, or ‘cove’ as he is wont to refer to himself, is the subject of Mr Dombey’s largesse when he receives a private education from him but fails academically and is bullied at school for being poor and by his old friends for his ridiculous school uniform. He leaves school and goes off the rails for a while before approaching Mr Carker for a job. Mr Carker sends him to be a spy with Captain Cuttle at the compass shop after Walter has been sent to the Caribbean and Uncle Sol has run away in his pursuit after hearing news that his ship was wrecked somewhere in the Caribbean. After completing this assignment he becomes Carker’s personal assistant and thus has knowledge of his elopement to France with Edith. Mrs Brown blackmails him to reveal the information while Dombey is hidden and Dombey uses this to pursue Carker. In the meantime, Edith turns on Carker while they are on the run in Dijon, reveals she really hates him and has used him and then disappears leaving Carker to flee, hotly pursued by Dombey. Carker leads a harried chase back to England but ends up getting run over by a train while physically running away from Dombey, who has finally caught up with him.
At this point the book becomes hurried, sentimental and pretty bad. Having proceeded at a very leisurely pace up to this point, including lengthy meanderings on topics like Paul’s schoolmates in Brighton to little narrative end, suddenly everything happens at once. Florence approaches her father to console him after Edith elopes with Carker but he reacts badly and hits her in the belief that she is siding with her stepmother. Florence is very badly shaken and runs away, ending up lodging with Captain Cuttle at the instrument shop while she recovers from the episode. Events then begin to take on the character of a children’s book where everything must have a happy and satisfactory ending. Florence and Walter are married, a prospect touted since their very first meeting, and have a child. Florence’s old servants return to dote on her once they have found her. As if one happy marriage is insufficient for the conclusion of the book, Dickens also marries Florence's maid, Susan, to a half-witted former schoolmate of Paul’s from Brighton on the basis that both of them are obsessed with Florence. The firm of Dombey & Sons goes bust once it has been revealed that Carker has been cooking the books and Dombey has to sell everything and grieve for the loss of his daughter. In another unlikely turn, Carker’s ill gotten inheritance goes to his siblings, who he treated very badly, who then return it to Dombey surreptitiously. After the passage of about a year or so, Dombey is reconciled with Florence and Walter, who now have two children, and goes to live with them and coo over his grandchildren; his character reformed and pride completely cured. The family is tended to by Susan, now Mrs Toots, both couples have children and all parties concerned are excessively happy. Edith too finds happiness as a recluse with her cousin and everybody is reconciled to everyone else. Even the dying Alice is nursed by Carker’s sister so that all loose ends are tied up in the fastest, most saccharine manner possible. I can also add that Alice is revealed to be Edith’s illegitimate cousin, which gives an accurate flavour of the book’s conclusion. It’s a really disappointing end to a book that promised much in its best sections and I ended up feeling a bit fed up and short changed by such a sloppy, facile denouement.
For me there were some great highlights of a remarkable variety. The half witted Mr Toots, his pugnacious sidekick ‘the game chicken’ and Major Bagstock are good comic characters. Carker’s flight from Dombey after Edith has left him is a wonderful description of an awful, heart pounding blur of fear and paranoia. There are several relationships that are skillfully described and developed, for example, Edith and her mother, Edith and Dombey, Florence and her father, Edith and Carker. Indeed, one of the most enjoyable aspects of the book was the diversity and intensity of these dysfunctional family relationships. There is also a good deal of narrative mystery relating to Walter’s shipwreck, Carker’s schemes, Carker’s siblings living in poverty and Alice’s return from Australia. However, in the end, perhaps the book was too varied and contained too many different strands forcing the hasty and shoddy ‘happily ever after’ at the end.
I think I would have preferred it if there wasn’t such a drastic change in pace at the end and that it wasn’t so universally happy and naive. It almost felt like a betrayal of the complexity that preceded it. It had the feeling of an author who’s tired of the characters and narratives they’d painstakingly created and decided to bring it all to a close as quickly and easily as possible.
This was an enjoyable read for the most part with some good narratives and great characters. However, the uneven pacing and the absurdly saccharine ending ruined it for me and drastically reduced the quality of the book when taken as a whole. I’m encouraged to read more Dickens but I hope all his endings aren’t so simplistic.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)