I finished A Tale of Two Cities today. I'm not reading a lot right now, so it's all slow going. No one cares about spoilering classic books, it seems. Fernando says there's a statute of limitations on spoilering. Like... once a movie's been out so many years, you can't expect everyone to hold its secrets. He says I expect too much of the populace.
If you intend to read this book one day, I am giving you fair warning that there are SPOILERS ahead. Because I am an honest and kind reader!!
If you want my opinion without spoilers, see my Goodreads review.
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Suspense Partly Spoiled
If you want to go around sharing the Famous Opening Lines of books, fine. But Famous Last Lines? Come on!
So going in I already knew the last line: "It is a far far better thing I do, than anything I have done" or something like that. Meaning: The character is doing something self-sacrificing. Spoiler.
But then on TV they always show the movie clip! So I know the guy is dying at the guillotine.
Then, a couple scenes into the book, I find out there are two men who look very very similar to each other. One is a wastrel, the other is a good man. Well obviously the wastrel is one day going to sacrifice his life for the good man. And since, in this same scene, it's clear they're both in love with the same woman, I know WHY he's going to do it too.
And that was it. A few pages into the book and I knew where it was all headed. Or beheaded. The fact that they look identical, that the trial in which it's proven never comes up again, and that they love the same woman probably would have tipped me off to an ending somewhat like this anyway. But still. I wouldn't have known for sure.
The Characters
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| My Dr Mannette played by Sutherland |
As for Lucie and Charlies, I don't care what happens to them. They were as underdone as Scrooge's bit of potato. Which is annoying because one knows what Dickens is capable of. Whatever his faults as a writer, I always enjoy his reams and reams of great characters. But Lucie and Charles were poopy, Sidney's the great romantic hero, but I never got to know him. He was a drunk lawyer, he fell in love. That's all I learned about him. His sort of friend was funny, but not around much and didn't serve the plot except to show that Sidney had silly friends?
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| Penelope Wilton played Pross... in my mind. |
The French
My other problem with the book was Dickens' description of the French Revolution. I didn't get the chance to care about the French people. There was Lucie and Charles and Manette, but they could have been any nationality. The characters he drew in most detail were all baddies. There were people you pitied, but they were sort of backdrops of piteousness. Not real people. You weren't given a couple Nice Poor People, Sans Murderous Intent to care about.
Dickens portrays the French as sort of Gremlins. When being downtrodden by the Nobility, they're cute and pitiful. Once they get their chance at revenge, they're pure evil. A moment later they go back to feeding their young, and being normal nice people, and then again they're rampaging about murdering. I guess Dickens was saying something about the breaking down of all order in society, and mob rule, and such. I think that's what my father took away from the book, and other people have as well.
But I want to understand how I too could end up like them. (I am part French, after all. Who knows what murders my ancestors committed?) I want to read a book like that and think, Well this is awful, but what other choice did they see they had? Or what about the Lando Calrisseans of the French Revolution, who did bad things because they felt their hands were tied? And between the aristocrats and the poor people, where were the intellectuals who were responsible for this mess? They're nowhere in this book.
Victor Hugo's Les Misérables is such a good counter-example of that--he carefully draws every character so that you understand them and how they became who they are. Two Cities should have been longer.
But still face-paced and moments of beauty
I still enjoyed the book, though. As I said, for the characters I did love. And Madame Defarge is a very good bad guy. And the second half is excitin', once Charles the idiot takes himself off to France.
There were also these little beautiful moments, such as the beginning when Mr Lorry is going to get Dr Manette, and keeps replaying in his mind the idea that Manette has been buried alive for a couple decades and he's being "recalled to life." It's a really haunting passage. And as this Dickens site points out, resurrection is a theme throughout the book. Apparently he almost called the book Recalled to Life, and I wish he had, because it would have lent it some thematic sense of wholeness.
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| My Mr Lorry, played by Caine |
But, though the bank was almost always with him, and though the coach (in a confused way, like the presence of pain under an opiate) was always with him, there was another current of impression that never ceased to run, all through the night. He was on his way to dig some one out of a grave.
Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves before him was the true face of the buried person, the shadows of the night did not indicate; but they were all the faces of a man of five-and-forty by years, and they differed principally in the passions they expressed, and in the ghastliness of their worn and wasted state. Pride, contempt, defiance, stubbornness, submission, lamentation, succeeded one another; so did varieties of sunken cheek, cadaverous colour, emaciated hands and figures. But the face was in the main one face, and every head was prematurely white. A hundred times the dozing passenger inquired of this spectre:
"Buried how long?"
The answer was always the same: "Almost eighteen years."
"You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?"
"Long ago."
"You know that you are recalled to life?"
"They tell me so."
"I hope you care to live?"
"I can't say."
"Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?"
The answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes the broken reply was, "Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon." Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was, "Take me to her." Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it was, "I don't know her. I don't understand."
After such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would dig, and dig, dig- now with a spade, now with a great key, now with his hands- to dig this wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth hanging about his face and hair, he would suddenly fall away to dust. The passenger would then start to himself, and lower the window, to get the reality of mist and rain on his cheek.
Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the moving patch of light from the lamps, and the hedge at the roadside retreating by jerks, the night shadows outside the coach would fall into the train of the night shadows within. The real Banking-house by Temple Bar, the real business of the past day, the real strong rooms, the real express sent after him, and the real message returned, would all be there. Out of the midst of them, the ghostly face would rise, and he would accost it again.
"Buried how long?"
"Almost eighteen years."
"I hope you care to live?"
"I can't say."
Dig- dig- dig- until an impatient movement from one of the two passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the two slumbering forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they again slid away into the bank and the grave.
"Buried how long?"
"Almost eighteen years."
"You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?"
"Long ago."
The words were still in his hearing as just spoken- distinctly in his hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life- when the weary passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that the shadows of the night were gone.
He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood, in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear, and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful.
"Eighteen years!" said the passenger, looking at the sun. "Gracious Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!"
