Bleak House. How can it be over? I hold this incredible book in my hand and can’t believe I have finished it. The 965 page, 2 inch thick, tiny-typed tome may seem a bit intimidating. Relax, you can read it in a day - that is, if you read one page per minute for 16 hours. And you might just find yourself doing that.


Bleak House is more Twilight Zone than Masterpiece Theatre. However there is enough spirit of both to satisfy everyone. And indeed it should - it has it all - unforgettable characters, intrigue, plot within plot, ruined love, enormous themes, complications, and description - and what description! it goes so far, a lesser writer would be lost forever trying to find their way back. Above all, it has that brilliant, constant satirical voice of Dickens. That is the thing lost in TV, film and radio adaptations of his work. One merely gets a hint of it in the best of these.

The plot, the characters, the very fog that we encounter in the introduction, are all connected to one main thread: a lawsuit, the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case. It involves an inheritance with several wills, and it cannot be decided which one is legitimate. The case is before the Courts of Chancery and has dragged on for generations.

Someone stands to gain a lot of money and property, but the long entanglement of the law has made it a curse. While greed and madness consume certain characters (sometimes literally), there are also those who know how pointless and destructive it is to live under such hope.

Bleak House is another reminder what an important influence Dickens was on Dostoyevsky, who understood his power very well.

Bleak House is alternatively narrated by the orphan Esther Summerson, and an omniscient third person. Dickens's sophisticated juggling of narrative invents a style that really can't be defined, just like the novel itself. Is it a thriller, a romance, magic realism, a murder mystery? Yes and no. Is it a treatise on poverty, domestic violence, false charity, obsession? Again, yes and no. All is mixed into the fog - along with that forty foot long Megalosaurus that Dickens summons in the opening paragraph – and emerges as one of the best novels ever written.

This is a very clever book because the main issue with it is exactly the point Dickens is making: it is so long and dragged out.

Bleak House is quite the achievement. It's a 900+ page monster made up a thousand different subplots with a large cast of characters. It also fanned the flames that led to a huge overhaul of the legal system in England. Buried beneath and entwined with the many subplots is the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce - Dickens's parody of the Chancery Court system (because the case is dragged out over many years).

I like Dickens, and I can appreciate what Bleak House does, but I'm sorry to say I won't be joining the ranks who consider this their favourite. His best work objectively? Maybe. Who even knows what that means? But definitely not my favourite. That would be Great Expectations-- a novel that just rips my heart out and stomps all over it.

I really do understand that this is the whole point, but so many chapters and events in this book were extended needlessly, padded out with waffle and meanderings that seemed to have nothing to do with the novel at large. That's very clever and all - given that this is a critique of a court system that extends everything needlessly and gets nothing done - but it's a bit of a chore to read. It's a shorter book than Les Misérables, The Count of Monte Cristo and War and Peace, but it truly doesn't feel like it.

The characters, too, were not as memorable as many of Dickens others. Having read it, I can now see why the Bleak House characters are not household names like Miss Havisham or Bill Sykes. I found them bland in comparison. I also think it was a mistake to have the simpering "I'm so modest and unintelligent" Esther Summerson as a narrator (Dickens's only female narrator). It's unfortunate because I think Dickens usually excels at first person narration, but Esther's constant need to reiterate her modesty and lack of intelligence is frustrating.

If I were rating this book based on how well it achieved what it set out to do, it would be an easy five stars. If you believe classics are not there for enjoyment but for self-flagellation, this is an easy five stars. Dickens successfully wrote a long and slow book to show how the legal system is so long and slow. Some of the subplots and character dramas were interesting; many were not.

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"The few words that I have to add to what I have written, are soon penned; then I, and the unknown friend to whom I write, will part for ever. Not without much dear remembrance on my side. Not without some, I hope, on his or hers." p.985

This is Dickens in 1853 writing to his reader through Esther as he brings to a close what I and just about everyone on my GR friends list acknowledge as Dickens' finest, most memorable novel.

Dang, but it holds up well – whether 160 years since publication or the 25ish since I first read it. I will not let so much time elapse before my next re-read.

My overall impression mere hours after turning the last page is that this novel is about the imperative of kindness. Concrete, tangible, purposeful acts of compassion to counter a world where the hope of justice is futile and where charity is arrogantly misapplied or applied with a colonial sledgehammer and too far afield to do any good for anyone who really needs it.

"There were two classes of charitable people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all."

Dickens' rage against those he sees as parasites (embodied here by lawyers), sucking dry the bodies that feed them, feels very contemporary. Yet this theme - while paramount and obvious, and the one I identified with most 25+ years ago - is set against its more subtle opposite: kindness and compassion, embodied in the Allan Woodcourts and Mr. Jarndyces of the novel (the latter of whom makes a specific issue to defer and evade acknowledgement of or gratitude for his charity).

The counterweight of the many and varied acts of kindness and compassion set against scenes of great tragedy and sadness give this novel its extraordinary balance, sweep and power.

It seems to me that what Dickens is saying and showing us is that kindness is the real heart and soul of justice, the emotional context for it not just the intellectual construct. He is saying, I think, that raging against the machine - seductive as that is, especially for the young! - is a less effective antidote to injustice than is acting with kindness and compassion. The former is the intellectual response, the professional one. The latter is for all the rest of us, who go about our lives every day the best we can.

You can get sucked in, as Richard Carson does, to a system that will ultimately destroy you - a system that will, like those who live off of it, self-combust in a puff of inconsequential smoke without you having done much of anything to hasten that process along.

Or you can just try to do the best you can with what you've got: "strive ... to be industrious, contented, and kind-hearted, and to do some good to some one, and win some love to myself if I could," as our almost insufferably optimistic but ultimately endearing heroine, Esther, does.

These characters' many, many acts of kindness -- not just the obvious ones of Esther and Mr. Jarndyce, but the small and more subtle ones such as Mr. Bucket's steady, diligent attempt to save Lady Dedlock; George's care for Phil, and his and Phil's care in turn of Jo; Sir Leicester's immediate, unquestioning forgiveness of his wife; Liz returning the favour of bringing medicine to Jo, as he had to her; and pretty much every scene Allan Woodcourt is in; plus so many more! -- never failed to bring a lump to my throat.

These characters are as real, and as well-rounded, and as deeply-felt and drawn as any in literature. They are shaded in a way that Dickens' characters often aren't. While some remain pretty much black and evil (Tulkinghorn), others change and grow, and if not completely reform, at least soften by the end. Some of the most grotesque (Guppy, the Smallweeds) become merely ridiculous, and therefore easily assimilated into the kinder, gentler post-Jarndyce v. Jarndyce world. (How delicious is the portrayal of the Leicester-Boythorn feud at the end! How marvellously nuanced and rendered harmless, albeit necessary, is that conflict!)

The characters rest within a plot that is part mystery, part character study, part love story, part social satire, part morality play – and which is as well-constructed, fast-paced and as ‘tight’ as it is possible for Dickens to be (remarkably so, in 900+ pages).

If you quibble with Dickens for his caricatured, one-note characters; his purplish prose and sentimentality; his wandering, sloppy and choppy plotting (all of which I have, in other works), I’m pretty sure you won’t here.

Bleak House is a masterpiece, and once again, I’m left feeling nothing but awe and gratitude for the experience of reading it.