Our Mutual Friend has long been my favorite Dickens novel—its high drama and low comedy, its social critiques and its series of remarkable yet satisfying coincidences. It was time for another reading; however, the paperback editions have such small print (causing premature drowsiness) and I wondered where I’d find a hardcover that wouldn’t be an inconvenient brick. Then I found the perfect solution: I’m reading it on my iPad. The font is easy to read, yet there’s no huge book to lug around.
This time around (my third?), I’m trying to focus on some of the novel’s more writerly aspects, rather than simply trying to keep track of the characters and the plot (which is, of course, a challenge in itself). Dickens seems so fully in control of his material here, in his final complete novel . The first chapter is drenched in moody realism, focused on the blasted lives of river rat Gaffer Hexam and his children, and the discovery of the drowned man. Yet in chapter two, Dickens introduces a completely different style for the Veneering sections—a hollow, distant tone that illuminates the empty, inauthentic lives of those who make their money on investment schemes and financial scams.
Here, we first meet the Veneerings:
Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.
For, in the Veneering establishment, from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms, to the grand pianoforte with the new action, and upstairs again to the new fire-escape, all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings—the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky.
As the Veneering plot moves forward, the tone gradually changes from merry to menacing: these are not merely people to laugh at.
I’ve just passed the 200 page mark: 1162 pages to go in the iPad edition.
