Bleak House was first published in 20 monthly installments between March 1852 and September 1853.

It is considered one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots.

The story alternates between a third person narration and the first person narrator of Esther Summerson (who is very sweet, but lacks personality).

Regardless the excellent writing, the development of the story is very slow. It takes some time to feel totally engaged, so I do recommend reading it in small doses, but eventually you’ll get hooked. The last 35% is the best part, in my opinion, with some good twists.

I’m a big fan of the 2005 TV series, adapted by Andrew Davies, who I think did a superb job writing the screenplay (and Gillian Anderson was terrific playing Lady Deadlock - a very gloomy character). I have watched it several times and I’m never tired of it (I do own a copy in DVD).

Because of the screenplay I had this book marked as my favourite book by Dickens, but now, after finally reading the unabridged book (and first time in English), I can say that it is one of my top 5 favourite books.

Paperback (Vintage Classics): 866 pages (no illustrations, notes or appendixes), 67 chapters

ebook (Penguin Classics): includes all original ilustrations - 1378 pages (default), 374k words

PS. This was a re-read, but first time in English (instead of Portuguese, my first language)

I loved it conditionally. It must have been very subversive in its time. Surely Esther Summerson is one of the best "good" women ever written. She is far more lively and interesting than either of her sisters-in-extreme-goodness, Fanny Price or Beth March. Nabokov loved this novel and he hated almost everything and so I will defer to his judgment.

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas my reading pace ground to a halt. Thanks a lot Dick...........ens!

This is a long book, but I've read longer ones that didn't seem half as long as Bleak House. Saharan-esque stretches of plodding plot didn't help. But more than that, this book suffers from having too much character, and characters with character, characterful characters with character to spare and well, you get the point.

By the time Dickens had written Bleak House he'd experienced almost every spot on England's social strata, so he knew people, he liked people, and he liked to write about the people he knew. There are some great, fully-formed fictional folks herein that seem more alive than a few real people I know. But that doesn't save this book for me.

There are also some two dimensional signposts added just to point the way. But that doesn't ruin this book for me.

The tangents some of these characters go on is what kills the story dead. Dickens resuscitates the plot with a tasty little tidbit now and then, such as giving you hope that the unending Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit might be resolved, but then along comes a longwinded lawyer or a humorous scene with some silly old people babbling and throwing pillows at one another. It's too much of a good (and occasionally bad) thing.

It's hard to fault the author and the quality of the writing for my low rating on this one. Dickens' craft is at its craftiest, but he focused too much of it on one aspect of writing, and for that the writer is at fault.

Bleak House was Charles Dickens’ 1853 novel that documents the tragi-comic events surrounding the chancery court case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce.

Told with an unusual blend of shifting perspectives, the first being a first person narrative and the second an omniscient, present tense narrator, Dickens describes a London where justice is turned upside down and personal values are intertwined with the doleful legal system.

** - Many of you know that I am a Tennessee attorney and let me just say that 160 years later, this kind of thing still happens. An estate is completely consumed by attorney fees. Not always the fault of the lawyers either: in a case a few years ago, one beneficiary said while pointing to another "I don't give a damn if I never get a dime, as long as HE doesn't get a thing!"

As with most of Dickens novels, Bleak House features an extraordinary cast and the author’s ability to convey a character is his genius. A good book.

** 2018 - This time of year is ripe for reading Dickens. I'm working on an estate right now where the parties, all family members, cannot agree that the sun came up this morning. One of his better books, this one deserves a re-read sometime.

Nomen Est Omen, in the world according to Dickens!

But don’t take it literally, especially not when reading the title of Bleak House. For Dickens also requires you to read between the lines, and letters, just like in an acrostic poem:

BLEAK HOUSE
Lovely characters
Elegant prose
Agonising cliffhangers
Knowledgeable descriptions

Humorous plot
Outrageous social conditions
Unusual dual narrative
Suits in Chancery
Everlasting favourite

Yes, Christmas is approaching, it’s Dickens time. I spent it in Chancery this year. And what can I say? Bravo Dickens? No, I stole that Thackeray phrase for David Copperfield last year already! Bravissimo, you fulfilled every single one of my great expectations, as did Great Expectations? Yes, ...

I will just say a simple: “Thank you, Sir!”

I have spent delightful hours in the company of good and bad, funny and passionate, silly and intelligent characters, brought to life in inimitable prose. Where else can I laugh and cry and bite my nails at the same time, while bowing to the elegance of the sentences that follow each other like pearls on one of Lady Dedlock’s more expensive necklaces? Where else can I hate and feel compassion, and wonder at the immense difference between my contemporary world and the London society of Dickens’ times,- and yet recognise it anyway, for being almost identical? For could not Dickens’ short comment on the state of British politics have been heading a newspaper article in 2016, just as well:

“England has been in a dreadful state for some weeks. Lord Coodle would go out, Sir Thomas Doodle wouldn’t come in, and there being nobody in Great Britain (to speak of) except Coodle and Doodle, there has been no Government.”

Following my reading itinerary, from start to finish, I realise how much I grew to love the many characters, all different, but equally at home in the Bleak House chocolate box, some nutty, some sweet, some rather plain, others exotic. In the end, they all lived up to my expectations, from the very first encounter with the complicated lawsuit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which gives the novel its unique flavour:

"In which (I would say) every difficulty, every contingency, every masterly fiction, every form of procedure known in that court, is represented over and over again?"

And what a range of characters I met, circling around the two stable elements of Mr John Jarndyce and Miss Esther Summerson, a young woman who shares the narration of the story with an omniscient voice, so that the narrative is swapping back and forth between her personal experience and impersonal overarching description.

Some characters, like Skimpole, get away with sponging ruthlessly on others because of their presumed innocence:

"All he asked of society was, to let him live. That wasn't much. His wants were few. Give him the papers, conversation, music, mutton, coffee, landscape, fruit in the season, a few sheets of Bristol-board, and a little claret, and he asked no more."

It is not as innocent as that of course, as the story will tell!

Many characters have reason to be frustrated, and Bleak House inspired me to rename my workroom as well, in honour of John Jarndyce’s favourite place:

"This, you must know, is the Growlery, When I am out of humour I come and growl here. [...] The Growlery is the best-used room in the house."

There is no one like Dickens to introduce the reader to a love story in the making, simply by changing the tone used to add a small piece of information at the end of a long chapter on something completely unrelated:

"I have forgotten to mention - at least I have not mentioned - that Mr Woodcourt was the same dark young surgeon whom we had met at Mr Badger's. Or, that Mr Jarndyce invited him to dinner that day. Or, that he came."

Another favourite feature in Dickens’ novels is the punny sense of humour that appears over and over again, and shows off both his talent for and his pleasure at playing with words for their own sake, as well as his mastery when it comes to giving all his characters their own stage time, beautifully shown in the following short lesson in mental geometry and verbal comedy:

"But I trusted to things coming round."
That very popular trust in flat things coming round! Not in their being beaten round, or worked round, but in their 'coming' round! As though a lunatic should trust in the world's 'coming' triangular!
"I had confident expectations that things would come round and be all square", says Mr Jobling."

Sociologists must love Dickens too. There is more than just a little irony in the sermon that Mrs Snagsby takes to be literal truth, directly applicable to her faulty perception of reality. What a comedy show! A victim of her own imagination and jealousy, Mrs Snagsby interprets preacher Chadband's words as a revelation of her husband’s infidelity, which leads to her total collapse during a sermon, completely inexplicable to the rest of the assembled community:

"Finally,becoming cataleptic, she has to be carried up the staircase like a grand piano."

Meanwhile, Mr Snagsby, "trampled and crushed in the pianoforte removal", hides in the drawing-room. What a marriage!

The linguistic pleasure of reading Dickens should not be underestimated either. His vocabulary is diverse, rich, and sophisticated, but he does not shy away from repeating the same word over and over again, if he thinks it has a comical effect and suits the story line. He was clearly on a mission to ridicule the habit of having missions, when he introduced a whole society of different do-gooders who were absorbed in their own commitments and oblivious of the existence of anything outside their narrow field of vision:

"One other singularity was, that nobody with a mission - except Mr Quale, whose mission, I think I have formerly said, was to be in ecstasies with everybody's mission - cared at all for anybody's mission.""

As always, Dickens has a special place in his heart for his minor characters, and fills them with so much intensity that they could easily lead the whole plot. A favourite example is the Bagnet marriage. Mr Bagnet, knowing that his wife is a better judge of situations than he is himself, and worth more than her weight in gold, has a habit of letting her express "his" ideas whenever he is consulted about anything, for it is important to him that the appearance of marital authority is maintained:

"Old girl", murmurs Mr Bagnet, "give him another bit of my mind."

And then there is sweet, crazy Ms Flite, who sums up the tragedy of her family in a few lines of incredible suggestive power, showing the effect of long law suits on the dynamics of generations of people living in suspense and frustration:

"First, our father was drawn - slowly. Home was drawn with him. In a few years, he was a fierce, sour, angry bankrupt, without a kind word or kind look for anyone. [...] He was drawn to debtor's prison. There he died. Then our brother was drawn - swiftly - to drunkenness. And rags. And death. Then my sister was drawn. Hush! Never ask to what!"

Ms Flite herself is also completely guided by Jarndyce and Jarndyce in every aspect of her life. She follows the suit in Chancery almost like a contemporary woman would watch the interminable episodes of EastEnders, always expecting a "judgment", despite knowing that the ultimate purpose of the show is to keep the actors and producers busy, and the spectators in excitement. She cries when the show finally wraps up and she sets free her birds, named after the passions that constituted the essence of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

That’s it for now? No wait, there is more!

Dickens is also a master of special effects, almost cinematic in nature:

"Everybody starts. For a gun is fired nearby.
"Good gracious, what's that?" cries Volumnia, with her little withered scream.
"A rat," says My Lady. "And they have shot him."
Enter Mr Tulkinghorn, ..."

And this shot turns out to be one of foreboding, for nothing happens without purpose and connection in Dickens’ world, and the story turns into a murder mystery. The man whose specialty was using secrets to control others finds his end with a bullet in his cold heart. What a good thing that Hercule Poirot has a worthy predecessor in Mr Bucket, who has the immeasurable advantage of being married to Miss Marple.

That’s it, now, finally? No! I can’t leave Dickens to tie up loose ends and make his surviving characters lead the lives they deserve, without mentioning the little boy who broke my heart:

"Jo is brought in. He is not one of Mrs Pardiggle's Tockahoopo Indians; he is not one of Mrs Jellyby's lambs, being wholly unconnected with Boorioboola-Gha; [...]; he is the ordinary home-made article. Dirty, ugly, disagreeable to all the senses, only in soul a heathen."

The description of how that illiterate, starving child’s heart stopped beating is one of the most touching moments in the whole story, along with the haughty, elegant Sir Leicester’s love and anxiety over his disappeared wife. In Dickens’ world, pity is to be found in very different places!

That all?

Nope! But I will be quiet now anyway …

Just stealing a phrase from Oliver Twist, and applying it to Dickens’ novels rather than food:

“Please, Sir, I want some more!”

Shivering in unheated gaslit quarters (Mrs. Winklebottom, my plump and inquisitive landlady, treats the heat as very dear, and my radiator, which clanks and hisses like the chained ghost of a boa constrictor when it is active, had not yet commenced this stern and snowy morning), I threw down the volume I had been endeavoring to study; certainly I am not clever, neither am I intrepid nor duly digligent, as after several pages I found the cramped and tiny print an intolerable strain on my strabismic eyes. Straightening my bonnet, I passed outdoors into the frigid, sooty streets, where shoppers bustled by in a frenzy, now rushing into the 99-cent store, bedecked with PVC Santa Claus banners, now into Nelson's Xmas Shoppe, in search of glistening ornaments. Bowing my head perversely against busy crowds and fierce wind, I stepped into a subway, which conveyed me to a winding street down which I hurried until I reached a peculiar establishment, the shingle for which had been battered by the strain of city winters, by pollution, and no doubt by the small mischievious hands of vandals, who had modified the sign with their colorful signatures and illustrations, but upon which could still be read - with some effort - Amperthump & Hagglestern, Booksellers.

I entered to a sound of tinkling bells affixed to the heavy door, the hinges of which creaked as I propelled myself through its narrow passage. Proceeding forward, I heard a sullen voice squeak, "Check yer bag, miss?" and glanced up to see an urchin, nearly lost amidst piles of remaindered volumes, beckoning with one grubby hand while clutching a wrinkled comic in the other; I refused, smiling gently, and passed into the densely cluttered shop, where I was intercepted by Mr. Amperthump, the proprietor, a gentleman of about three and forty, whose thick-rimmed spectacles and corpulent physique recall two of a tragic trinity of dead singers, who upon seeing me took my cold hands in his ink-stained ones and kissed them. "How can I assist, my dear?" he boomed so loudly that a little one-eyed spaniel started from its slumber, and the urchins shelving books glared up at their master with undisguised annoyance.

Drawing out my small copy of Bleak House, which I had obtained from the Queens Public Library -- supported, to wonderous effect, by the subsciption of tax dollars, and no doubt supplemented by charitable impulses of certain gentleladies -- and endeavored to explain, as simply as I could, that I desired an edition of the same narrative writ larger and in more mercifully legible print. However Mr. Amperthump appeared distressed and could not remain silent long, flinging my book away. "NO!" he cried. "You are too young and pretty" (at this I blushed and tried to protest, for I am not pretty, in fact I am plain) "to be reading this antiquated rot! Here, instead, is the latest experimental fiction from Rajistan D. McGingerloop." At this he placed in my hands a queer volume, unlike any I had seen before. "Throughout his controversial career McGingerloop has exploded one by one conventions of the novel... in this latest work he has done away with pages!" And indeed, when I examined the book I discovered he was quite right, and that the book I held was a brick of paper, and could not be opened, having as he indicated, no pages at all. I thanked Mr. Amperthump for his solicitude, at which point he pressed that I try Petunia al Gonzalez-Mjobebe's story of a love affair between an Iranian transexual and a Chinese android, a meditation, Mr. Amperthump assured me, on globalization and identity, but also, he said, a suspenseful legal thriller in its own right, albeit one subverting the conventions of that genre - quite, he added, subversively. Finally I was given to understand that in addition to Mr. Amperthump's conviction that I should not be reading Dickens, he had none in stock, and finally I gave my thanks for all his kindness and passed out again into the filthy snow and gloom.

Bleak House: Charles Dickens on Fog and Fossils

"The wheels of justice turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine.

n  n
n  Issue One, Bleak House, March, 1852n

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of this review or whether that station shall be held by another will depend upon the lines on this page. For, you see, although I was not born a lawyer I became one.

I would beg the reader's attention to hold a moment. For, as Charles Lamb has told us, "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once." I was--an innocent one, too. And it was with that degree of innocence I embarked upon an education in the law with the intent to see justice done. I had great expectations of it.

However, to my shock, which led to a general state of appall, I discovered that not all those who obtain the license to practice law seek what is right, but an end that serves to line their wallets. Their clients were but a means to that end. Thank Providence those of that rank were in the great minority.

At one time those of our profession were considered not merely lawyers, but counselors, meaning that a meeting of the minds was a better outcome than long and bitter litigation, where costs mounted, the ire between the parties increased, and I understood the meaning of the old adage which serves as an epigraph to these lines. The wheels of justice ground so slowly and so finely and the final ruling was obtained, there was nothing left to fight over.

Now, Charles Dickens understood just how slowly and finely the wheels of justice turned. During the time Mr. Dickens wrote Bleak House the Court of Chancery had become the scene of many a case for which the parties waited for a ruling for literally years. Quite an odd court it was. It was the court of jurisdiction for the appointment of guardians for minors, the care of the mentally infirm, and the administration of wills and estates. Now the matter of its jurisdiction was not odd, you understand. It was the manner in which jurisdiction was exercised.

You see, there was no testimony of witnesses. None! All proceedings were based on the affidavits of the parties and any witnesses material to the matter. You would be quite correct in thinking that in most occurrences, the witnesses were not the mutual friends of the respective parties.

Then there was the matter of all those affidavits having to be copied. Hand copied. Oh, the parties had to pay for those, too, whether they gave a fig for them or not. Then, of course, the case in hand had to be docketed. Well. You can imagine how many a Chancery Clerk supplemented income by accepting, uhm, gratuities, shall we say, to set down the matter to be heard.

Dickens was such a brilliant man, capable of producing the most wonderful allusions and metaphors. Ah, the opening of the novel, in the fog, the structure of the Inns of Court appearing as some teetering fossil of a Megalosaurus. Oh, yes. Dickens knew of what he wrote. After all, that was the first dinosaur discovered. And where should it be dug up but in England in 1676. It would only take the dunderheads another hundred and fifty years to name it. It means "giant lizard." Lets see-1676 plus 150. That would make it, why, 1826. Young Dickens would have been fourteen.

n  n

But I cannot do it justice. Why just look at it.

“LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.”

Sublime. It is simply sublime.

But, if I might be allowed to digress a bit. Consider the man. Has it occurred to you, dear reader, how many English novelists there were when Charles Dickens became a publishing sensation in 1836 with The Pickwick Papers? Well, there were none. He was it. Here he is as we are accustomed to seeing him.

n  n

No, of course, he's not smiling. One did not smile in Victorian photographs. Ah, but he did laugh. A lot. He loved theatrics and performing as an actor. He was known to walk every street in London, sometimes twenty-five miles a day. His children tell us he would return home to write. They would witness him mugging in the mirror, making strange faces, speaking in different voices. In the process he brought every level of English society to every level of English society through his writing.

To be continued...After all, it is a Dickens review.

Okay, so this is the 1853 version of The Wire. But with less gay sex. And no swearing. And very few mentions of drugs. And only one black person, I think, maybe not even one. And of course it's in London, not Baltimore. But other than that, it's the same.

Pound for pound, this is Dickens' best novel, and of course, that is saying a great deal. I've nearly read all of them so you may take my word. Have I ever written a review which was anything less than 101% reliable, honest and straightforward? Well, there you are then.

Bleak House gives some people a leetle problem insofar as you have half of it narrated by Esther (Goody Three Shoes, too good for just two) Summerson, who you ache to have a few bad things happen to, because she trills, she sings, she sees the best in everyone, tra la la, tweedly dee dee. This does get on some people's nerves. But I downloaded a dvd called Dickens Girls Gone Wild last week and let me tell you there's a whole other side to Esther Summerson - given the right surroundings (I think it was Malta, and the sangria was flowing) she could be good company.

However. Bleak House as a whole does no more than take it upon itself to explain how society works. And it's utterly gobsmacking. There are a lot of words in Bleak House's 890 pages but gobsmacking is not one of them. It's a word that was invented to describe Dickens novels.

In my younger, more innocent days I had no patience for the long-drawn affair of a Dickens novel. When I read Bleak House for the first time I devoured the first 200 pages and felt suddenly so full that the prospect of another 680 pages made me nauseous in anticipation. Each subsequent chapter went down painfully as though I were trying to swallow mud. I did manage to finish the book, however, and vowed thereupon never to read another Dickens novel again. The strange thing is, though, I digested the book—slowly and over the course of nineteen years, assimilating its girth as would, I imagine, the stomach of a whale. And before I knew it, the boredom had gradually crystallized and turned into the memory of pleasure. What? Am I nostalgic to the point of taking pleasure in the pains of yesteryear? Am I a retro-active masochist? No Ulysse, you are perfectly normal. You didn’t know it then, but what you read was a masterpiece. A novel essentially about waiting. Waiting for the fog to lift. Waiting for the sun to rise. Waiting for the rain to cease. Waiting for the streets to fill with people waiting for people to arrive. Waiting for the execution of a will. Waiting for an illness to subside. Waiting for your family’s forgiveness. Waiting for marriage. Waiting for death. Waiting for birth. Waiting, waiting, waiting. And you, Ulysse, you were waiting for the book to end. Bleak House that novel of endless deferment. Right from the start we are stuck in the mud. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth. Dogs, indistinguishable in mire, horses scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Mud accumulating at compound interest. Here we are trapped in a big mud machine whose sole purpose is to get us inside its wheels, so that they will keep turning while we run around in circles and accumulate interest mud. And become mud ourselves. Words, so many words, too many words caught in the wheels of a story splashing over us, covering us in mud. One wants to get away—but one can’t run in mud. Mud-words stick to the soles of one’s feet. Everything has taken on the slowness of a nightmare. Oh fascinating slowness! Nothing really happens. A lot of people die, but somehow death seems tributary to the plot, which like a muddy river flows implacably on towards nothing. And yet, you get a feeling of satisfaction when you have reached the last sentence and shut the book with a thud (for me Dickens can only be read in hardcover—he requires that final thud. And, another thing, make sure you chose an edition with a typeface you like, for you’ll be spending a lot of time looking at that typeface). When I was twenty-two the feeling I had on finishing the book was one of relief. I had finally gotten myself out of the mud, rid myself of Dickens and his glutinous sentences. The young me hated waiting. The young me wanted thrills—to live life to the fullest. Bleak House continually frustrated my need for immediate pleasure. I wanted to grab this loose baggy monster by the scruff of the neck and shake it, just like one might want to grab Vholes, Kenge and Tulkinghorn by the scruff of the neck and shake them. This time around my thoughts went more along these lines: yes, life is a succession of waiting for things to happen, which more often than not do not happen, but instead of doing nothing while waiting I might as well look around the room I am waiting in, which may happen to be the whole wide universe. And the people I am waiting with, I should pay attention to them too and observe the way they dress and sit and say certain things and the way their hands talk and the way the sunlight plays in their hair and listen to their stories and laugh with them and empathize with them and perform little acts of kindness that will make their lives a little lighter, and mine too. And waiting, well, isn’t waiting just another word for living? For isn’t the ultimate thing we are waiting for simply the end of all waiting? The end of waiting, the end of living. So while we’re waiting why not pick up a copy of Bleak House by Charles Dickens (hard cover, please) and ever so patiently and passionately and with the mud of his words in our mouths wind our thoughts through the labyrinth of waiting he wrote for us all to enjoy?

Not gonna lie – as I have struggled to read I am also struggling to find the words to write reviews. Sometimes I am having luck and writing some reviews I am pleased with, but mainly I am just delayed in finding the time and motivation to put my review on the page. For this I apologize as I love communicating with my Goodreads friend through reviews. I currently have three books I have finished – one over a week ago – that I have yet to write a review for. So, nothing like chipping away at them the best I can!

Bleak House is a tough one to review anyway – even if I was not having reader/reviewer block. So, for this I am going to do one of my favorite form of reviews when I just need to brainstorm my thoughts. The famous “Bullet Point Review”. Prepare for stream of consciousness!

•tI listened to this one. It had one reader. I think this would have benefited from multiple readers as I had a hard time distinguishing when it was Esther speaking. Normally I don’t prefer multiple readers, but I think it would have helped here.
•tSpark Notes: Once again, a savior! I spent a lot of time on Spark Notes with this one. Every chapter. Sometimes it helped – many times I encountered the “Did I just read that?” issue.
•tDespite any complications, I did enjoy this book. Not my favorite big book. Not my favorite Dickens. But, definitely decent.
•tOne thing I think that helps to put this into perspective is that this was the “mini-series” of Dickens’ time. He released this in installments; thinking of the story as installments instead of one, huge imposing tome helps. Also, it helps when thinking about the fact that it was broken down into smaller parts, so it had to have mini-climaxes throughout to keep people coming back for more.

I read this with my Completist Book Club on Goodreads. Maybe now that I am done, I can review the discussing and improve my understanding and overall experience with my fellow club members!

Bleak House the novel is – as you would expect – pretty bleak, but Bleak House the eponymous house in the book is one of the happier places to be found therein. In any case this being a Dickens novel you should not expect a wall to wall bleak fest. You would need to pop over to Hardyverse (also called Wessex) for those.

Bleak House is difficult to synopsize, it is about so many things and so many people. It has a very large cast of characters and a lot of intrigues. However, don’t let that put you off Dickens knew how to structure and narrate his novels in such a way that it can be followed without much confusion. At the centre of the novel is a lawsuit called “Jarndyce and Jarndyce” (the “Vs” is not used in those days), a case that just drags on and on for decades with no end in sight. The details are so serpentine that nobody can make head or tail of and several interested parties are driven insane by the wait for its conclusion.

The protagonist of Bleak House is Esther Summerson who narrates at least half the novel in the first person. The rest of the book is narrated by an omniscient narrator (but you can call him Charles). Esther is from Dickens’ stock impossibly nice ladies who seem to always put the interest of everybody else ahead of herself. In spite of a sad and lonely childhood and not knowing who her parents are she is mostly quite chirpy and optimistic. A major aspect of the novel is the secret identity of Esther’s mother. I won’t tell you anything about her except that in the recent BBC adaptation she is played by Gillian Anderson, best known as “Scully” from The X-Files, just so you know she is not to be trifled with (she is also on the book cover). There are so many plots and subplots in this book and I would be here all day if I were to mention them all. The book is highly flavored with myriad elements, comedy, tragedy, whodunit etc, there is even a spontaneous human combustion! That last one knocked me for a loop.

As usual Dickens populates Bleak House (the novel not the house) with a cast of colorful characters, many of them with funny names like Jellyby, Pardiggle, Skimpole, Smallweed etc. Dickens is often accused of creating unrealistic cartoonish characters usually defined by one quirk. However, he actually based most of those on actual people he knew and satirized them, and they are very entertaining to read about. I must make a special mention for a Harold Skimpole. Initially I thought he was a prototype hippy or freeloading surfer dude, but as the novel progresses he becomes increasingly pernicious, with an “ingenous (not ingenious) simplicity” that is quite infuriating when you realize what his game is. There is also a policeman called Inspector Bucket that reminds me a little of Hercule Poirot (though he is not French).

In spite of being quite tragic at times I find Bleak House vastly enjoyable and would recommend it to fans of Victorian fiction. Those new to Dickens should start with the shorter and less complex Great Expectations.

My enjoyment of the book is much enhanced by the  freebie audiobook from Librivox. This one is read “solo” by the wonderful Ms. Mil Nicholson who has graciously read several Dickens novels for the public domain. She is one of the very few Librivox volunteer readers who can match the best of professional readers from Audible.com, with voices galore. I must remember to send her a thank you note.

Dana Scully Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock.

Addendum: A word about the prose style, I think Dickens' writing skill is not so much a talent as a superpower. However did he come up with those turns of phases? The quotes I have chosen are not the pithy, inspirational ones people tend to highlight, just the ones that made me laugh:

""Upon my life," said Mr. Skimpole, shrugging his shoulders with his engaging smile, "I have not the least idea what he is to do then. But I have no doubt he'll do it".
This is Skimpole's way of saying that he does not give a shit about whether a sick boy will live or die if left in the street uncared for.

"Writing was a trying business to Charley, who seemed to have no natural power over a pen, but in whose hand every pen appeared to become perversely animated, and to go wrong and crooked, and to stop, and splash, and sidle into corners like a saddle-donkey. It was very odd to see what old letters Charley's young hand had made, they so wrinkled, and shrivelled, and tottering, it so plump and round."
Esther's lovely description of teaching her maid to write.

“I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.”
Ha! Skimpole for President!

Note: Most of your favorite Dickens tropes are present and accounted for!

Roll back to 1986—I was touring with Loudon Wainwright III upon the release of his More Love Songs album (which includes the famous ‘Your Mother & I’) when Loud strikes up a confab about Dickens. “Nicholls,” he begins, bunk-loafing in his usual roguish manner. “I do declay-ah that Bleak House is the greatest novel of the century, yessir-ee.” I was strumming a zither at the time, co-writing a song that would later appear on History. “Loud, you must be out of your mind. Everyone knows now that Ulysses is the greatest novel of the century.” Never one to miss a literary quotation, Loud shot back: “Thank you, Mr. Burgess. How many other books you read this week, one or two thousand?” Those were fine times, until the drinking and restraining orders, etc. And now, twenty-five-and-a-bit years later, I have read Bleak House, and I can see why Mr. Wainwright was so smitten. Sprawling in its epic sprawlingness—a Gargantua of fog-blocked Weltschmerz—a complex, challenging dual narrative—a scathing satire on the circumambiguities of the law and the chancers who practise—a vibrant and lively Dickens crackerbox of eccentrics and noble memorables—a long long long long saga of such sublime and intolerable long long long longness other long things seem short in comparison—a breathtaking final third where all the plots converge in a most invigorating heartsmacking masterful manner—oh Yes. Take that, Loudon.