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: The best of books, the darkest of books
Review: .... ...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. Yes, everything is resolved at the end for better or ill, but still: there is a dark, pitiless buzzing (like a wasp trapped in your stove pipe hat) that remains with you long after you have finished the book and read others.
Rating: 
Summary: underappreciated
Review: An interesting assumption undergirds George Orwell's fascinating essay on Charles Dickens, that everyone reading his essay will have read and remembered nearly every word and certainly every character of Dickens. Once upon a time, this was likely true. We're all familiar with the story of eager readers waiting at the dock to greet the ocean liners that were bringing the next installment of Great Expectations. If memory serves, it is also a book by Dickens that the womenfolk read aloud to themselves in Gone With the Wind, while the men are out on their first Klan raid. It was undoubtedly the case, particularly when the art form of novel was itself young, that everyone used to read all of Dickens enormous oeuvre. Today though, I doubt whether many of us get past about four or five of his most popular works: A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. At least, I know I've got about five others sitting on a shelf collecting dust, their daunting size defeating my mild wish to have read them. But recently PBS ran a Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Our Mutual Friend and it was terrific, which proved sufficient motivation to read it too. In barest outline, John Harmon is the heir to a junkman's fortune. But his father conditioned the inheritance on his marrying a young woman, Bella Wilfer, whom the elder Harmon had once met in the park when she was a mere child. Harmon rebels at the notion, for her sake as much as his own, and when fortune presents him with the opportunity to stage his own death, he takes it. A corpse, later identified as Harmon, is found floating in the Thames by Gaffer Hexam and his daughter Lizzie, whose trade it is to loot such bodies. With John's "death," the fortune reverts to Nicodemus Boffin, who had been an assistant at the junkyard. Boffin and his wife bring Bella to live with them, in hopes of alleviating her disappointment at not receiving the fortune. The avaricious Bella is indeed determined to marry money and so has little inclination, at first, to humor the affections of John Rokesmith, the mysterious young man (and eponymous Mutual Friend) who comes to work as Boffin's personal assistant. Meanwhile, while Gaffer Hexam has a falling out with his old partner Rogue Riderhood, Lizzie gets her bright but selfish young brother into a school, where his teacher Bradley Headstone develops an unhealthy love for Lizzie. She is also being pursued by the young lawyer Eugene Wrayburn, despite the obvious difference in their social stations. While the first story line features the moral development of Bella and the growing love between her and John Harmon/Rokesmith, the second soon degenerates.... Beyond the two basic plots, the book is completely overstuffed--with ridiculous coincidences and impossible happenings; with characters who are little more than caricatures, some too virtuous, some too malevolent; with subplots that peter out and go nowhere. Running it's course throughout the story, like a liquid leitmotif, is the River Thames and brooding over it are the enormous piles of "dust," the garbage on which the Harmon fortune is founded. It all gets to be a bit much, but it's also really refreshing to see the great novelist at work. This is what Tom Wolfe meant when he urged modern authors to get out and look around and write about what they found, instead of penning the increasingly insular and psychological novels which have become the staple of modern fiction. Dickens got the idea for the body fished from the water by seeing rivermen at work, for Charlie Hexam after seeing such a bright young boy with his father. The "dust" piles were in fact a real source of wealth, in a society where the refuse of the well to do could be used again by the poor. If Dickens writing is ultimately too broad for us to think of the book as realistic, it at least attempts to capture the flavor (or the stench) of a time and a place and it is animated by the society that teemed around him. If Dickens ultimately seems to have tried to do too much, better a novel like this where the author's reach exceeds his grasp than to settle for one where the author ventures little. Sure it could stand to lose a couple hundred pages, a few subplots and a dozen or so characters, and it's not up to the standard of his best work (there's a reason after all why we all read the same few books) but it's great fun and, even if just to watch the steady growth of Bella Wilfer and the steady disintegration of Bradley Headstone, well worth reading. GRADE: B
Rating:
Summary: Like Jane Austen...
Review: Charles Dickens novel "Our Mutual Friend" is by far the best novel I've read to date. He masterfully portrayed Victorian London society, and the overwhelming emphasis of money at that time. In this novel Dickins work is similar to that of Jane Austen, aside from the dark underlying settings the novel at times goes. This book by far to me, is a story of how love conquers all, even money.
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Summary: Murky Educations by the Thames
Review: 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 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!
Rating:
Summary: A Little Bit of Everything
Review: Dickens draws you completely into his tale. There are so many rich characters, some as dark as night, others so comical I found myself laughing out loud. I can't decide if it was all the surprising twists or the love that emerged between characters that I liked more. No matter what your taste, there is something for you in this classic. Although it is considered very dark, I will remember it for its humor and enthusiasm.
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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.
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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.
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Summary: Move over Dostojewsky
Review: Even after a decade in the USA, I am still surprised to notice the difference in the appreciation for Dickens versus Dostojewsky. In the Western Europe that I grew up in, Dostojewsky's greatness was certainly recognized, but looking at the complete output of the writers, 95 out of a100 readers familiar with the works of both of them would prefer Dickens. Here in the USA it often seems to be the very opposite. Dickens is often seen as the master of caricature that wrote that nice story about Christmas, whereas Dostojewsky is considered as the writer of that ultimate masterpiece about those Karamazovs. While I still consider reading "the Brothers" in its entirety among my greatest earthly achievements, I preferred "Our Mutual Friend" by far. In addition I would encourage anyone with lingering doubts about Dickens the'master novelist' to give this great book a try. While it may lack the energy of his earlier works, the superior plot structure, and Dickens' contrapuntal use of his characters place this novel among the best in the writer's oeuvre, and the best of the century in which he was writing. Some may consider it to gloomy, but a fairy tale was not what he was going for. Still, there is plenty of humor, often of the more wry variety. While this book is not among Dickens' easier reads, it is certainly infinitely more accessible than the "Karamazovs". Even though it may have been written in a lighter vein the contents are certainly not below those of "the Brothers", and in many respect more meaningful to the contemporary reader.
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