Penguin Classics Our Mutual Friend (Paperback)

Perhaps the darkest Dickens novel, in terms of plot-driving devices; murders, theft, blackmail, beatings and the lot, the reader is left to derive the lesson each is there to offer. The story, lacking in a real hero or heroine as a focal point, is a far bleaker portrait of English society than in his past works.

However, woven into these dim themes, Dickens has interjected his typical wit and joviality to lighten even the blackest of plot twists.

Of course the usual roster of colorful, lively Dickens characters grace the pages of this book, although the novel is seemingly bereft of a hero and heroine, at least in the traditional sense. However; the denizens of Dickens' world in this novel will entertain and enchant every bit as much as in his other works.

Dickens imparts many words of wisdom in the pages of this book, his last completed novel: Money cannot buy happiness; be careful what you wish for; keep your friends close and your enemies closer; and many other time-honored cliches that stand true today.

For a good time, call Charles Dickens. His novels never fail to deliver.

"Our Mutual Friend" begins with Lizzie and her father Gaffer Hexam patrolling the river in the dark of night. Pulling a body out of the river for the potential reward money, the novel jumps right into the action with a bang. The body is presumed to be that of young John Harmon, just returned from South Africa to claim a huge inheritance from his recently deceased, hateful and miserly father. The only heir dead, the elder Harmon's loyal employees, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin stand next in the will to inherit everything. This causes a stir in Society, where Mortimer Lightwood, the legal executor of the will, and his friend Eugene Wrayburn are called in to view the body and question Gaffer Hexam. This causes two others to be drawn into the plot - Lizzie Hexam, an uneducated, but prescient young woman, who immediately catches Wrayburn's eye, and Miss Bella Wilfer, a sprightly young woman whose marriage to young John Harmon was the sole condition for that gentleman to come into his inheritance prevented by his untimely death. The novel tries over the next 700 pages to work out the personal ramifications of the murder, the will, and the fates of these two young women.

So many of Dickens's novels deal with the lives and educations (scholastically, socially, or both) of young people, and "Our Mutual Friend" is no different. Gaffer Hexam, the boatman, is opposed to book-learning, and refuses to allow either Lizzie or his younger son Charley, to learn even to read. Lizzie arranges, though, for Charley to remove himself from the cycle of riverside drudgery by facilitating his escape to a school, where he excels under the tutelage of one of Dickens's most intense characters, Bradley Headstone. Elsewhere, the Boffins, now in a state of financial ease, seek to improve their cultural understandings, hiring a literary man "with a wooden leg," the well-versed Silas Wegg, and even buy the mansion that Wegg works in front of. Other characters, like the mercenary Bella Wilfer, the absolutely indolent Wrayburn, and the articulator of bones, Mr. Venus, all seem to be in sore need of social and moral educations.

Just to kind of continue this theme, one may be particularly interested in the kinds of literary funds that Dickens draws on in "Our Mutual Friend": His debt to 18th century literature is heavy indeed, with the works of the poet James Thomson and the historian Edward Gibbon coursing through the novel like the very Thames itself, laying the groundwork for literary and historical commentary on the nature of Empire and particularly British Imperial interests, and how those interests reach from the international into the lives of individuals. Another important predecessor in this line is the infamous Mr. Podsnap, a very dark descendant of Laurence Sterne's Corporal Trim from "Tristram Shandy." Trim's famous flourish, in Podsnap's hands acquires the power to annihilate entire nations. Dickens also reveals heavy debts to fairy tales and nursery rhymes that continue and complicate the novel's emphasis on children's educations, how they are managed, and the impact that they can have on the world as it will become.

If you aren't interested in reading "Our Mutual Friend" yet, you should be! Clearly, my interests lay in the national and educational strains of the novel, but there's obviously so much more. Now, my knowledge of Dickens may be limited to the five or six novels I've read so far, but you will be hard pressed anywhere in Dickens, (or anywhere else for that matter), to find a more frenetic villain than Mr. Bradley Headstone - to see him in action alone makes this novel worth reading. He ranks right up there with "David Copperfield"s Uriah Heep in terms of Dickens's most insistently horrifying creations. Ok. Enough from me, go, read "Our Mutual Friend." What are you waiting for! Go, now!

It's not the length of the novel that's the problem (it being of average length for Dickens's larger works), nor the usual limitations of the author's writing style (the utterly unconvincing portrayal of female characters, the grindingly forced humour, the welter of two-dimensional characters, the inevitable surfeit of padding by an author writing to quota), rather I felt that Dickens was guilty of one of two fatal errors. Either he was over-ambitious in trying to develop simultaneously, and with the same importance, several plots within the novel, or he was incapable of deciding which plot and which set of characters should be the main driving force of the novel.

That's a pity, because "Our Mutual Friend" starts off well: a night scene on the Thames, a drowned man, a mystery concerning an inheritance. Unfortunately, I soon became bogged down in a lattice work of characters as Dickens skipped from one plot to another, failing convincingly to develop those plots and the characters in them.

There are interesting themes in the book - a febrile economy based on stock market speculation, a glut of rapacious lawyers, the contrast of private wealth with public squalor - 140 years later, has England changed that much? But such interesting social criticism died quickly, along with my interest in this book.

G Rodgers