OUR MUTUAL FRIEND

“Before my eyes he grows suspicious, capricious, hard, tyrannical, unjust. If ever a good man were ruined by good fortune, it is my benefactor. And yet, Pa, think how terrible the fascination of money is! I see this, and hate this, and dread this, and don’t know but that money might make a much worse change in me. And yet I have money always in my thoughts and my desires; and the whole life I place before myself is money, money, money, and what money can make of life!”

And money, in a word, is the theme of Our Mutual Friend, my Dickens read for 2011. I enjoyed five-sixths of this book a lot—it’s Dickens’s last complete novel and a showstopping demonstration as his maturity as a writer, chock-full of what he does best: colorful characters with awesome names, from Rogue Riderhood to Fascination Fledgeby (rather than being structured around a single plot and a few subplots, OMF has a huge cast of interlocking characters revolving around a central idea, similar to Bleak House), and social analysis (sometimes earnest, sometimes satirical).

Unfortunately, near the end, there is a plot twist that almost ruined the book for me. There’s really no way to explain this plot twist succinctly (as friends subjected to my in-person rants about it can testify, it requires me to summarize a very complicated story, and even then I don’t think that expresses the full magnitude of the twist), but suffice to say that it is so supremely ridiculous that it could only have been topped by one of the characters waking up to discover the whole thing had been a dream. I read it on the train, and I could barely restrain myself from grabbing the arm of the passenger next to me and demanding, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS?!” (I suppose I have to at least hand it to Dickens for completely surprising me, since usually he telegraphs all story developments from 100 pages away.)

Now, Dickens is known for having some silly plot devices, from long-lost twins to spontaneous human combustion, and usually the more crazypants he gets, the more I like it—I don’t read him for restrained realism, but for larger-than-life Victorian melodrama. The problem with this twist is not just that it’s so outlandish, but that it invalidates his entire message, including most of that nice little speech at the top of this entry. The narrative arcs of two characters I’d really been interested and invested in turned out to be a sham, part of a scheme so overwhelmingly creepy that if Dickens had presented it as horror, I would have eaten it up with a spoon; but instead he makes it out to be the best thing since sliced bread, and after the big reveal the manipulated character actually thanks her manipulator for totally making a fool out of her and secretly controlling her life for years on end! I might even have been able to handle this if I felt that Dickens had done it intentionally, but instead it seems like a last-minute cop-out to avoid having to go through with making one of the book’s more lovable characters into a villain. So the author forces through a deus ex machine and gets his happy ending (which, usually, no matter how contrived, is one of my favorite parts of a Dickens novel), but only by betraying his premise (the power of money over people) and shutting down any possibility for character growth (I’d found it so fascinating that here were two Dickens characters who seemed to actually be changing, one for the better and one for the worse, when usually he writes people who are either obviously good and stay that way, obviously bad and stay that way, or ambiguous until tested by events).

This insanity left a bad taste in my mouth as I finished the book, but upon reflection, I still liked OMF overall. It’s certainly not my favorite Dickens (those honors remain with Bleak House for serious goodness and Nicholas Nickleby for frothy fun), but I’m glad I read it, and I’d still recommend it for the advanced Dickens reader (one who already loves him and has read the major works already), as long as you take the ending with a huge grain of salt—like, maybe one of those big blocks of salt they sell for water softeners. There were an awful lot of good bits, after all; I dogeared about a hundred pages, but here are just a few of my favorite excerpts:

• …cheeks drawn in as if he had made a great effort to retire into himself some years ago, and had got so far and had never got any farther. [The introductory description of Melvin Twemlow]

• Mrs. Wilfer sat silently giving them to understand that every breath she drew required to be drawn with a self-denial rarely paralleled in history.

• “You incarnation of sauciness,” said Mrs. Wilfer, “do you speak like that to me? On this day of all days in the year? Pray do you know what would have become of you, if I had not bestowed my hand upon R.W., your father, on this day?”
  “No, Ma,” replied Lavvy, “I really do not; and, with the greatest respect for your abilities and information, I very much doubt if you do either.”

• Of an ungainly make was Sloppy. Too much of him longwise, too little of him broadwise, and too many sharp angles of him angle-wise. One of those shambling male human creatures born to be indiscreetly candid on the revelation of buttons; every button he had about him glaring at the public to a quite preternatural extent. A considerable capital of knee and elbow and wrist and ankle had Sloppy, and he didn’t know how to dispose of it to the best advantage, but was always investing it in wrong securities, and so getting himself into embarrassed circumstances. Full-Private Number One in the Awkward Squad of the rank and file of life was Sloppy, and yet had his glimmering notions of standing true to the Colors.

(I’m definitely going to start working “Number One in the Awkward Squad” into my everyday parlance, by the way. Possibly also “You incarnation of sauciness.”)

And my very favorite part, because I love that in two paragraphs Dickens is able to paint such a heartbreakingly astute and compact portrait of a character who plays little to no role in the novel. It’s almost like a small story in itself, and it makes me love her:

..Miss Peecher the schoolmistress, watering the flowers in the little dusty bit of garden attached to her small official residence, with little windows like the eyes in needles, and little doors like the covers of school-books.

Small, shining, neat, methodical, and buxom was Miss Peecher; cherry-cheeked and tuneful of voice. A little pincushion, a little housewife, a little book, a little workbox, a little set of tables and weights and measures, and a little woman, all in one. She could write a little essay on any subject, exactly a slate long, beginning at the left-hand top of one side and ending at the right-hand bottom of the other, and the essay should be strictly according to rule. If Mr. Bradley Headstone had addressed a written proposal of marriage to her, she would probably have replied in a complete little essay on the theme exactly a slate long, but would certainly have replied yes. For she loved him. The decent hair-guard that went round his neck and took care of his decent silver watch was an object of envy to her. So would Miss Peecher have gone round his neck and taken care of him. Of him, insensible. Because he did not love Miss Peecher.