Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dazzling!, 12 April 2007
I was quite simply dazzled by this book and zoomed my way through it in a few days. I wanted more, even after this race through its nearly 900 pages, taken in by the breathtaking scope not only to be found in the diversity and credibilty of even the most eccentric characterisations, such as Wegg or Podsnap, something only to be expected from Dickens, but by the moral flux of so many situations and in the thoughts of the likes of Mrs. Lammle or Bella Wilfer. The cruel satire encarnated in the figure Mrs. Wilfer alone had me laughing out loud and the Society scenes around the Veneering's table are so marvellously observed that they had me wondering how on earth Dickens could have had a friend left in Victorian 'polite society'! Brilliant. The river-shore scenes are amongst the most wonderfully atmospheric I've come across in his work: one wonders again what manner of 'field work' Dickens did to to depict this strangely amphibious half-world and it's population. The tone of the prose, too, was in marked contrast to the only very slightly earlier Great Expectations; greater in breadth of style and scale, with far sharper social criticism and biting humour. In fact, it's the humour, and its very darkness, which I felt most stood out in this tour-de-force. Yes, it's a whopping great book: yes it might take you time to get through, and yes again, the very wealth of its style, the range of personalities, settings, motives and dilemas will inevitably mean that one's attention becomes selective. Yet this only means the challenge is greater and, for this reader anyway, the rewards higher. I really loved it, and would encouarge anyone who's enjoyed a Dickens to have a bash.
|
|
|
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gruesome Masterpiece, 15 Feb 2001
By A Customer
Dickens at his darkest best. The later books lean dangerously towards gloom and despair with Dicken's basic philanthropy put to the test. The villain of the piece is modern industrial society which reduces humans to body parts (like machines). In a Hieronymous Bosch-like landscape, black and bleak, Dickens' brilliant characters act out (sometimes comic) roles over which they have seemingly no control and the novel is a cliffhanger whose outcome hangs in the balance. Along with Bleak House and Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend is a must-read of classic English Literature.
|
|
|
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining, 8 Jan 2003
By A Customer
Jenny Wren, the crippled doll's dressmaker, who knows everyone's "tricks and manners", Wegg, the one-legged sheet-music salesman, the Veneerings, who are all veneer, Mr Venus, the anatomical craftsman who makes skeletons and keeps Hindoo babies in jars, Boffin, the upwardly mobile manservant who has come into "dust", Sloppy "who do the policemen in different voices", Fascination Fledgeby and Bradley Headstone, the homicidal schoolteacher; I defy anybody to study the cast of characters and not want to read the book. And with the characters comes a very entertaining and well-worked plot.
I have to say I approached this book with some trepidation, and there were certainly longuers - Lizzie Hexham is unutterably boring and I wondered why Bella Wilfer didn't batter Boffin and divorce her husband for all the deceptions they concocted against her - but it was immensely entertaining, a real relief from the everyday.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
Show more editions and formats
Show fewer editions and formats
by Charles Dickens
by Charles Dickens
by Charles Dickens
by Charles Dickens
by Charles Dickens
