Once you realise it's OK to want to slap Esther around a bit, she becomes a wonder of psychological observation. In Esther Summerson, the little busybody with the jangling keys and the plain face, he created an uncannily accurate portrait of how sanctimoniously awful someone with low self-esteem can be. The two narratives wind round each other like a double helix, generating new kinds of mysteries between them.Īnyone too who likes to trot out that old line about Dickens not being able to do psychology, or women, or both, should try Bleak House. But there's another narrator too: Esther Summerson, as slippery and blind as any postmodern trickster. To be sure, Dickens has one of these, an all-seeing, weighty cove who can hover over roofs and barge through walls and show us all the characters from Jo the crossing sweeper, to Miss Flite in her birdcage lodgings, to Mr Bucket, the inscrutable detective. They should read Bleak House too if they're convinced that omniscient narrators are the only kind you find in novels of the 1850s. Anyone who thinks that the high Victorian novel is a synonym for plodding realism really ought to read this top-hatted version of Jurassic Park. It's an extraordinary image, stretching and collapsing time in the outrageous notion of a prehistoric monster let loose in legal London.

There's that extraordinary opening, describing a murky November day in London where there is '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 so wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill'.

So here they are, the very unalike GK Chesterton and Vladimir Nabokov, both of whom agree that Dickens never wrote better.

I think it's Dickens's best book and, given that it's all about Chancery, I'd like to call expert witnesses. All the usual fun is here, but it's in the service of a sustained moral inquiry into the evil that manmade systems do to the people they're supposed to help. Monthly serial, March 1852-September 1853ĭickens wrote his ninth novel at that perfect hinge in his career when he was finally able to channel his creative exuberance into a sustained and sophisticated piece of narrative art.

Bleak house book