Our Mutual Friend

The novel is easily readable. It reveals a great deal about English society in the mid-19th Century in and around London. The novel, by Charles Dickens, reveals a society in early industrialized Briain strugling to meet its Christian and economic responsabilities to the poor, as well as to the 'class assumptions' of a traditionally, and rigidly class-based society. It deals with the challenges of moral and good people, as well as the 'not so' good and 'not so' moral people, at every station of society, attempting to deal with issues bigotry, poverty, agedness, classism, greed, and sexism. It has many 'Dickenson-type' off-beat characters that challenge one's patience and touch the heart. It is a great read for anyone. It has great potential for skilled English teachers at the upper high school levels and incoming freshmen in College, and certainly Graduate school, with the proper critical models for discussion. It is a long novel, but well worth the money for purchase and the time involved in reading it.

Like Shakespeare, it's very hard to compare him to anyone but himself. And this is not his best: uneven, rushed in spots, a few plot pot holes that jar rather badly. But it's not his worse by any means, either: it has an admirable clarity, the social commentary is pointed but not [too] preachy, and each person in the huge cast of characters is wonderfully individual. There are some signs of his degenerating health if you are looking for them, yet the overall effect for me was fresh and funny, a fine English farce as only he could create.

I hadn't read Dickens in quite a while. Ten years had passed since I closed the cover of Bleak House and put it back on my bookshelf. But then I happened upon a recent biography of Dickens written by Jane Smiley (of all people). Being a huge fan of both author and subject, I picked it up. I won't review Ms. Smiley's book here (it's excellent, read it), but I was surprised to hear her heap such praise and adoration on this book. I'd heard of it and I knew it was one of Dickens' last works. But that was about all I knew, having limited my exposure to his "better known" works. Did "Our Mutual Friend" belong in the hallowed ranks of Dickens' best? I figured, a Pulitzer Prize winning author must know what she's talking about, right?Well, she does. "Our Mutual Friend" is like a great meal at a fine restaurant. Chew slowly. Savor each bite. The beauty of this book is in its extraodinary and wonderful style of writing, delightful similes, vivid and uncanny character development (Dickens is the master, but he outdoes even himself in this work) and that odd sense you get when you close a masterpiece that you just had a once in a lifetime experience. The man can write!Make no mistake, this is a tougher read than the earlier, more "Dickens-y" novels. But the characters are more rich, complex and interesting than in any other of his work. If you don't feel a sincere sense of mourning for Mr. Boffin's decline into miserism, and joy for...(well, I won't spoil the plot for you), then I can't help you. The caustically satiric language may be a shock to those used to the milder styles of Copperfield and Pickwick, but it is brilliant and I believe it is his best work. The grim story line is far from the lilting plot of a Nickleby, but it is gripping. I don't think I could name my "favorite" Dickens book. "Bleak House" and "Great Expectations" are up there. But "Our Mutual Friend" would certainly be a prime candidate.

Charles Dickens's 1865 novel, his last completed novel, "Our Mutual Friend" is an extraordinarily dark and convoluted work. Featuring such unforgettable figures as Mr. Boffin, Mr. Podsnap, Bradley Headstone, Jenny Wren, and Silas Wegg, Dickens continues, or rather concludes his artistic legacy with a work rich in well written and compelling characters. Exploring, as do many of Dickens's works, the intricacies of inheritance, "Our Mutual Friend" is also deeply concerned with families and the things that hold them together or rip them apart. Interesting and fraught emphases on education, upholding particularly English interests in the face of the still rising British Empire, and concerns about the absolute uncertainties about life and death, this is quite a way to come at a last complete novel."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 inte

.... ...of all the mighty works that his pen produced, hard pressed as I am to choose, I would say - if forced - that "Our Mutual Friend" is my favourite. Not by much, admittedly ("Bleak House", "Little Dorrit" and "Dombey and Son" will keep knocking at that door), but they haven't managed to barge into the pride of place reserved for "Our Mutual Friend" - the seat closest to the fire, as it were - just yet. The reason "Our Mutual Friend" is my favourite Dickens? Well. It is just so dark. (You may say that "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" is a darker work, and you may be right, but that is not a novel - that is a murder glimpsed through the window of a passing train - you don't know if it is serious or jest, and you will never ever find out.) This book - "Our Mutual Friend" - is a veritable nest of vipers. Not only that. The vipers are black. The vipers are made of night. Which isn't unusual. Dickens (like Milton) knew how to paint a good villain. Just that - whereas elsewhere, there is one singular villain (Bill Sykes, or Quilp say) - here there are many villains, each as dark as the other, each as particular and distinct a kind of nightmare as can be imagined. You have the corruption of the conniving Lammles, the crusty, flaky, stinginess of Silas Wegg, and the waterlogged, badmouthing of underhanded Rogue Riderhood. You have the insane obsessive love of Bradley Headstone. The two-faced usurer Fascination Fledgeby. You have - peculiarly this, but true all the same - the blackness of the river. The river is a villain in "Our Mutual Friend". The river is an enemy to truth. It swallows up stories as equally as it swallows up the bodies of the drowned. Like "Heart of Darkness", the river and its denizens (the houses that line the dirty shoreline, the population of those houses) poison everything, and the poison seeps out of the lowest house and into the highest. The river is responsible - at least in part - for the story about which everything else revolves: the Harmon murder.Alongside the darkness (and elaborated within the pages of Peter Ackroyd's excellent biography "Dickens"), you have a definitely out-of-the-ordinary oddness to proceedings. This is an odd book. Dickens always provided comic relief. With a book this dark, you would think the comic relief to be all the more comic, but this is not the case. What once was comic is now slightly deranged. The relationship between Bella Wilfer and her father is like something out of a David Lynch movie. The character of Mr Venus, too. Is he a taxidermist? What is that fascination with bottled dead things? And bones? You have the young miss, the friend of Bella Wilfer, Jenny Wren, deformed maker of doll dresses. She is comic but, somehow, laughing at a child so weary from her corrupt bones as to look like an old old woman is wrong.As such, the whole is a puzzle. Second time through, it isn't any easier. But that - essentially, dissatisfaction, or ambiguity - makes for a tremendously satisfying reading.