Our Mutual Friend (Ultimate Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Dickensian Quagmire
Review: "Our Mutual Friend" is the last of Dickens's completed novels, and apart from "The Mystery of Edwin Drood", the only one of his novels I had hitherto not read. The more I've read Dickens, the less impressed I've been. Before I began "Our Mutual Friend", I thought that "Little Dorrit" was his worst, but I'm afraid "Our Mutual Friend" now takes the top spot in my list of Dickensian horrors.

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

Rating:
Summary: A river runs through it
Review: "Our Mutual Friend," of all Dickens's novels, most emphasizes what a disgustingly filthy city London was in the 1860s. To be fair, it was probably no less sanitary than most other large cities of the world at the time, but Dickens takes peculiarly great interest in bringing the dirt to the surface in meticulous detail, as though he wanted to chronicle this information for a more health-conscious future age. The central feature in "Our Mutual Friend" is the Thames River, a watery morgue filled with floating corpses, and whose wharfs and docks are a dank repository for a variety of shady misfits. It is here, in the novel's opening scene, that the boatman Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie, who regularly scavenge the river for treasure-laden corpses, pull a body out of the river which turns out to be the remains of one John Harmon, heir to a wondrous fortune.

Harmon's death is obviously a case of foul play, but Dickens is less interested in rendering it a mystery than he is in spinning it into a web of character interaction in a grandiose study of cause and effect. Like that of a spider, the web is intricate and delicate: A man named Nicodemus Boffin, who inherits the money bequeathed to Harmon, may be suspected of the murder but appears innocent enough, especially in his and his wife's philanthropic nature manifested in their adoption of an orphan named Sloppy and their invitation to a girl named Bella Wilfer to live with them. Bella, whose father is a meek clerk for a member of Parliament named Veneering, and whose suitor was none other than the deceased John Harmon, receives the romantic attention of a young man named John Rokesmith (the titular "mutual friend"), who ingratiates his way into Boffin's employ as a secretary and is harboring a dark, crucial secret about his identity. The romance of Rokesmith and Bella--who, to complicate affairs, admits she only wants to marry a rich man, not a pauper like Rokesmith--is contrasted with the fierce rivalry of the snobbish lawyer Eugene Wrayburn and the jealous schoolmaster Bradley Headstone for the heart of Lizzie Hexam, whose brother Charley is Bradley's pupil.

Enough? Too much? That's not even the half of it. A novel like this, released periodically at the time of its initial publication, was intended to fill the same evening hours of entertainment for the reasonably educated reader that today are reserved for stultifying television shows. Dickens's contemporary readers had time to kill, so his long, convoluted stories were welcomed as instruments of leisure, his caricatures as veiled representations of the kinds of "other" people most people would recognize, ranging from the grotesque (the street balladeer Silas Wegg of wooden leg, the bone merchant Mr. Venus, and Jenny Wren, a doll's dressmaker with the mind and mouth of a remonstrative adult in the body of a child) to the strictly anti-grotesque (John Podsnap, an extremely self-satisified man who fatuously pursues a flawless society in which to cloak himself) to the affectionately stereotypical (the Jewish moneylender Mr. Riah).

"Our Mutual Friend" was Dickens's last completed novel, following the one I consider to be his masterpiece, "Great Expectations," and while it doesn't quite attain the quality of its predecessor, I judge it to be one of his better achievements because it lacks much of the sentimentality of his earlier works and the plot doesn't rely so much on improbable coincidences. This novel is more about the mood invoked by the sordid ash heaps and polluted waterways of the greater London area, populated by a vast cast of characters whose individual and collective stories build a microcosm that exemplifies a literary master at the consummation of his skills.





Rating:
Summary: Dust to Dust
Review: Dickens's last completed novel gets off to a dramatic start with the recovery of a body from the River Thames. The body is believed to be that of John Harmon, the heir to a fortune amassed by his eccentric and miserly father, a "dustman" or refuse contractor. (In the 19th century, the word "dust" was often used in the sense of waste or refuse). Old Harmon had left his fortune to his son on condition that he should marry a young woman named Bella Wilfer, although there is no reason for this condition other than the old man's eccentric perversity. Upon the announcement of young Harmon's death, the money passes under the terms of the will to Nicodemus Boffin, a trusted employee of the old man, who adopts Bella as his ward.

Unlike some of Dickens's other novels, such as "Oliver Twist", "David Copperfield" or "Great Expectations", "Our Mutual Friend" does not have a single principal character at its centre. It has three main plots. Two of these are love stories. Bella is loved by John Rokesmith, the mysterious young man who finds employment as Boffin's secretary. The spoilt and mercenary Bella (Dickens may have chosen her surname because of its closeness to the word "wilful") initially rejects him as being too poor, but later comes to appreciate his good qualities. The other love story concerns Lizzie Hexam, a poor working-class girl who, with her father, finds the body in the Thames. Lizzie has two men contending for her affections, a young barrister named Eugene Wrayburn and an obsessive schoolteacher named Bradley Headstone. The third main plot concerns an attempt by a dishonest acquaintance named Silas Wegg to blackmail Boffin and defraud him of his wealth.

The method of publishing novels in monthly parts doubtless made economic sense in the 19th century, but artistically its effects were less beneficial. It tended to result in books which were overlong and which bore all the hallmarks of having been written in a hurry. "Our Mutual Friend" seems to have suffered from this more than many of Dickens's other novels. Many passages- even whole scenes- seem to have been inserted for no other reason than that Dickens needed to write a few extra pages in order to meet his monthly quota by the deadline for publication. The attempts at humour often fall rather flat and are not well-integrated into the rest of the book.

Nevertheless, this is still a powerful work. Dickens's main theme (as in some of his other works) is money, and its power to corrupt both those who possess it (such as old Harmon) and those who aspire to it (such as Wegg). Money is associated with images of waste and decay; old Harmon's fortune, which Wegg hopes to acquire, is based on the fact that he possesses large amounts of other people's rubbish. At a lower level, Lizzie's father Gaffer Hexam earns his living (albeit a meagre one) as a "dredgerman", one who salvages flotsam from the river. As the Thames was notoriously polluted during Dickens's lifetime, this can hardly have been a pleasant occupation.

Even when money is not literally earned from dirt, it can still come from morally polluted sources or have corrupting effects. Dickens has some sharp comments to make about grasping usurers and corrupt financiers such as Fascination Fledgeby and about the frantic mania for investing in shares which swept Britain in the 1860s. This seems to be a permanent feature of our economic system; Dickens could just as easily have been describing the speculation boom of the Twenties which preceded the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression, or the "Greed is Good" mentality of the Eighties, or the more recent "dot com" bubble. The sleazy nouveau-riche politician Hamilton Veneering is also a figure instantly recognisable to modern eyes. Even worse, in Dickens's view, was the callousness of many wealthy people of his day towards the poor; as in other novels such as "Oliver Twist" he attacks the Poor Law, the workhouse system and those individuals such as the complacent Mr Podsnap who would defend the system by denying the reality of poverty.

This is, however, not just a fictional treatment of the theme that money is the root of all evils. Boffin and his wife remain kindly, good-hearted people despite their unexpected prosperity. There are also villains whose villainy does not spring from greed or avarice. The most notable example is Bradley Headstone, a brilliant portrait of a man in the grip of both obsessive love and obsessive jealousy. He reminds us that stalking, like political sleaze, is not an exclusively modern phenomenon.

Perhaps the most complex character in the book is Bella Wilfer. Dickens has been criticised, often with some justice, for his inability to create credible heroines. He can create memorable female characters if they are old, ugly or wicked, but his young, beautiful and virtuous heroines are frequently pale and unconvincing figures who refuse to come to life. Everyone, for example, remembers "Great Expectations" for Miss Havisham, but few readers will remember it for Estella. Even in "Our Mutual Friend", Lizzie Hexam tends to conform to the type of the impossibly pure and noble beauty; only her social background sets her apart from Dickens's other, more middle-class, heroines. Bella is one of the few exceptions, precisely because she starts off as an unsympathetic character and gradually becomes more likeable. Initially a spoilt brat, she comes to realise that Rokesmith's unselfish love for her is more important than her hopes of wealth.

The River Thames is a constant presence in the novel; several important scenes are set on it or by its banks, either in London itself or upstream or downstream of the capital. This helps to give the novel a thematic unity and draw together what is otherwise a rather sprawling, diffuse book. It reminds us that Dickens's London is one of literature's great fictional landscapes, a landscape rooted in the real Victorian city but given extra vividness by the power of his imagination. (Apart from the marsh country of North Kent, where he spent much of his boyhood, no other geographical locations come to life in his writing in quite the same way). "Our Mutual Friend" is not Dickens's greatest work, but it contains one of his best evocations of this urban landscape. It also contains a penetrating analysis of the corrosive effects of greed on society.

Rating:
Summary: Dickens' finest (and most "Modern") novel.
Review: Elusive in a good way, of course. Our Mutual Friend, his last novel, shows some decidedly modernist techniques and situations that were very much ahead of their time. This novel would have been at home if written in, say, the early twentieth century. The twin images of the River and of Garbage (not just decay and dust, but also recycling and renewal) permeate the beginning of this book, and carry through with characters that don't fall into easy categories. All of the requisite Dickensian elements are here, but the reader is also presented with an ending that is both an epiphany and a recognition that the story REALLY doesn't end, after all; storytellers just move onto different subjects. In other words, there isn't the neat bow at the end of the novel that is so prevalent in Victorian literature--one more reason this novel remains somewhat apart from Dickens' other works, while at the same time being a fresh, engaging read. Probably not the best work to begin with, if you're new to Dickens, but if you have the rhythm of his prose down from other, shorter works, you'll certainly enjoy the greater complexities of Our Mutual Friend.

Rating:
Summary: An Unhelpful Introduction
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: sad
Review: In the works of Charles Dickens, a reader can find many valuable life lessons threaded into the myraid plots, subplots, and character diversions. In Our Mutual Friend, those life lessons are no less abundant than in other works that I have read.

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.

Rating:
Summary: A Patchwork of Plot Lines
Review: One character in Dicken's novel, Our Mutual Friend, the crippled Jenny Wren pieces together scraps of cloth and thread out of London's refuse to create beautiful doll gowns for aristocratic children. Dickens here does the same. In the beginning several fragmented plots give a hodgepodge sampling of many social and moral ranks of London society. Dickens then proceeds to artfully interweave all the threads to create a coherent story. I could not award five stars because what Dickens fails to do in all of his literary meanderings is to devote enough time to any one character or group of characters to create deep sympathy or really anything more than a passing interest. Earlier works like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and Nicholas Nickleby all had a definite protagonist. While Dickens might step away from him for any length of time, we are attracted to the story because we are made to feel something for the character and to wish to see how events will unfold in his life. I just didn't feel that in Our Mutual Friend.

Dickens does succeed with his customary wit. I was glad that the underdogs won in the end, even those that seemed to play only a small role in the novel's events. But the ending was too formulaic for my post-modern tastes (the villians die, the heros marry), but I do give it four stars, for though this may be my least favorite Dicken's novel thus far (I've read 4 others), it is leaps and bounds better than many of the world's novels.

Rating:
Summary: Almost a cracking thriller
Review: Our Mutual Friend was the last complete novel Dickens wrote and, until the BBC television adaptation was made in 1998, it has also been one of the more obscure. It's a long book - most of Dickens's books are very long - and there are a number of plot diversions that don't really go anywhere, the most glaring example being the sub-plot of the machinations of the unfortunately shackled together ne'er-do-wells Sophronia and Alfred Lammle: they are spectacularly unsuccessful in carrying out anything remotely sinister beyond oily ingratiation (Dickens wrote his novels in installments for his own magazine and probably had plans for this couple to be more effective in their collusions; perhaps he either changed his mind or was talked out of it - just as he was persuaded by Bulwer Lytton, author of The Last Days of Pompeii, to get Pip and Estella together at the end of Great Expectations). The other thread that fails in Our Mutual Friend is the incessant satirizing of social climbers: the Veneerings, Podsnaps and Lady Tippins are worthy of Dickens's scorn, but they take up too much space - it's satire too drawn out and not particularly consequential to the workings of the plot.

However the meaty bits of plot in Our Mutual Friend provide a delicious stew of adventure, intrigue, romance, violence and murder set amid the dust mounds and the fetid waterways of mid-nineteenth century London. Once again, Dickens proves his unmatched ability to describe dirt! Once you've entered Mr. Venus's taxidermy shop, or spent time with Rogue Riderhood on the Thames, it takes a while to get the smell of dust, embalming fluid, rotting corpses, mud, and death out of your consciousness.

The plot revolves around a hero forced to change his identity because of the terrible danger he finds himself in after inheriting a great pile of money (courtesy of piles of dust!). He is tested in his resolve by the capricious Bella Wilfer, as sexy a coquette as Dickens ever dared put into his oeuvre (which means she's really not very sexy at all but we're talking about Dickens here - the man had nine children but seemed to prefer to avoid the "unpleasantness" of sex in his work). At the same time Mr. Venus and the ghastly Silas Wegg conspire to transfer the lucrative dust from Mr Boffin, the hero's other benefactor, to themselves. Meanwhile a whole other universe of plot is making its way through the novel - this involves Lizzie Hexham (one of Dickens's almost sickeningly goody-goody heroines) and the men who love her. The scenes where Bradley Headstone declaims his wrath at his languid rival, Eugene Wrayburn, are thrilling in their intensity. Headstone is one of Dickens's great villains because he's totally consumed by his infatuation for Lizzie - we can feel the white-hot intensity of his desire to bed her - he's incapable of reining-back his terrible obsession. And Eugene is a worthy addition to Dickens's cast of characters - he becomes infatuated with and eventually grows to love Lizzie in spite of his almost terminal ennui.

Our Mutual Friend would have been a cracking thriller (with a bit of romance chucked in) if Dickens wasn't so profligate with his writing. Nevertheless it is worth persevering with. As always, the descriptions and the characters place this book in the realms of great literature, as most of Dickens's works are. However much his style becomes unfashionable, there are always redeeming features - his sharp observations and characterizations temper his galloping over-sentimentality and his tendency to waffle on in certain areas especially while trying to make a point about the society of the time is redeemed by his unmatched powers of description, particularly his ability to describe dirt in all its permutations.

Rating:
Summary: To many subplots
Review: The main plot of murder and the person in disgust really drive the story, but all the subplots in the book is quite tedious. It makes you feel like u want to drive through those part, and get at the heart of plot. But all-in-all the novel ends w/ everyone deserving what they got, as a Dickens story should be.

Rating:
Summary: Dickens at his best
Review: When i was younger i used to be wary of the sheer length of such works-never fear!Not for one moment was this masterpiece a chore in any way.Ive read 300 page books which were twice as hard to get through.If you appreciate classic literature,especially Dickens this is one of those novels that is a pure pleasure simply to get back to-youll anticipate the start of your next reading session. While there may be a slight criticism of the realness or believability of some of the main characters(esp. the female ones)they are individual enough to rise above the stereotypes one may at first feel they conform to.No doubt Dickens created his own 'Dickensian' universe where the characters may not be as bare boned and raw in terms of reality as more modern writers(reviewers comment that his readership were tiring of his style in favour of more naturalist writers like George Eliot around 1860's)but within the confines of the writers world the book works wonderfully well.No matter what the subject or mood and however dark they may be there is always an exquisite brand of humour,a biting sarcastic tongue-in-cheek commentary running through Dickens writing and none so more than in Our Mutual Friend.If your reading this or others of his novels and you are not laughing then you are just NOT GETTING IT!While he uses hyperbole often in his tales there is here plenty of poignant social commentary.There is also a dark thread permeating the story which acts as a good contrast to the humour and it is through this darkness that the best lessons are learned,the best points are made. The plot is very very involved and works for the most part although one has the impression Dickens may have changed dramatically a particular storyline at the end.It is written in the unusual style in that he intentionally hints and prods the reader to a certain conclusion early on,then not much later reveals the mystery-which i think worked well. Lastly i have just watched the new BBC production of this book and as much as tv can capture this it does very well but whatever you do read the book first(the tv series while of quality must intrinsically be inferior-it will really detract from the book).Never once was this book a task and ive now promised myself to read his entire set of works-so take up this book-you wont regret it!