55 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth every effort to read., August 5, 2001
I think that it may be hard for the modern reader to find the time to read _Our Mutual Friend_. It's length makes it undeniably difficult to fit easily into the daily allotment of reading time. Weighing in at over 900 pages, it was originally published as a twenty-part monthly serial. There are also a number of situations and details that while very familiar to the Victorians, will be almost wholly incomprehensible to the reader of today (for instance the role of dust and dustmen and the mounds in the yard of the old house).
It's also clearly not Dickens' sunniest work. At the time of its release already, people spoke nostalgically about the more gentle nature of _David Copperfield_ or _Oliver Twist_ . While the farce that constitutes such an important element in Dickens' works is present, it's tainted with a note of bitterness that conveys a feeling of pervasive sadness throughout this great novel.
Dickens was working on this book when he was caught in the Staplehurst rail disaster and narrowly escaped death when his car was the only one of the first-class cars not to plunge from a bridge into a river bed. He was one of the people who climbed down the side to do what he could for the dead and dying. Dickens himself mentions the accident in his afterword, and at the risk of reading too much into the incident, it's hard not to read this book from the perspective of an aging man who narrowly avoids death himself. The nature of death, and the idea of escaping it by a hand's length, is one of the themes that comes back over and over again in _Our Mutual Friend_
The plot hinges around a disputed inheritance and mistaken identity, with a meditation about love as societal coin. The characterizations and situations in this novel are among his best-- particularly worth mentioning are Rogue Riderhood and his resurrection, the insane love of Bradley Headstone, the crippled doll-maker Jenny Wren, and the loyal Mr. Sloppy.
I'm not sure that I can call this my favorite Dickens, _Little Dorrit_ still has a strong claim on that position, but it's certainly one of the strongest reading experiences that I've had in a while.
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52 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Murky Educations by the Thames, May 21, 2002
Charles Dickens's 1865 novel, his last completed novel, "Our Mutual Friend" is an extraordinarily dark and convoluted work. Featuring such unforgettable figures as Mr. Boffin, Mr. Podsnap, Bradley Headstone, Jenny Wren, and Silas Wegg, Dickens continues, or rather concludes his artistic legacy with a work rich in well written and compelling characters. Exploring, as do many of Dickens's works, the intricacies of inheritance, "Our Mutual Friend" is also deeply concerned with families and the things that hold them together or rip them apart. Interesting and fraught emphases on education, upholding particularly English interests in the face of the still rising British Empire, and concerns about the absolute uncertainties about life and death, this is quite a way to come at a last complete novel.
"Our Mutual Friend" begins with Lizzie and her father Gaffer Hexam patrolling the river in the dark of night. Pulling a body out of the river for the potential reward money, the novel jumps right into the action with a bang. The body is presumed to be that of young John Harmon, just returned from South Africa to claim a huge inheritance from his recently deceased, hateful and miserly father. The only heir dead, the elder Harmon's loyal employees, Mr. and Mrs. Boffin stand next in the will to inherit everything. This causes a stir in Society, where Mortimer Lightwood, the legal executor of the will, and his friend Eugene Wrayburn are called in to view the body and question Gaffer Hexam. This causes two others to be drawn into the plot - Lizzie Hexam, an uneducated, but prescient young woman, who immediately catches Wrayburn's eye, and Miss Bella Wilfer, a sprightly young woman whose marriage to young John Harmon was the sole condition for that gentleman to come into his inheritance prevented by his untimely death. The novel tries over the next 700 pages to work out the personal ramifications of the murder, the will, and the fates of these two young women.
So many of Dickens's novels deal with the lives and educations (scholastically, socially, or both) of young people, and "Our Mutual Friend" is no different. Gaffer Hexam, the boatman, is opposed to book-learning, and refuses to allow either Lizzie or his younger son Charley, to learn even to read. Lizzie arranges, though, for Charley to remove himself from the cycle of riverside drudgery by facilitating his escape to a school, where he excels under the tutelage of one of Dickens's most intense characters, Bradley Headstone. Elsewhere, the Boffins, now in a state of financial ease, seek to improve their cultural understandings, hiring a literary man "with a wooden leg," the well-versed Silas Wegg, and even buy the mansion that Wegg works in front of. Other characters, like the mercenary Bella Wilfer, the absolutely indolent Wrayburn, and the articulator of bones, Mr. Venus, all seem to be in sore need of social and moral educations.
Just to kind of continue this theme, one may be particularly interested in the kinds of literary funds that Dickens draws on in "Our Mutual Friend": His debt to 18th century literature is heavy indeed, with the works of the poet James Thomson and the historian Edward Gibbon coursing through the novel like the very Thames itself, laying the groundwork for literary and historical commentary on the nature of Empire and particularly British Imperial interests, and how those interests reach from the international into the lives of individuals. Another important predecessor in this line is the infamous Mr. Podsnap, a very dark descendant of Laurence Sterne's Corporal Trim from "Tristram Shandy." Trim's famous flourish, in Podsnap's hands acquires the power to annihilate entire nations. Dickens also reveals heavy debts to fairy tales and nursery rhymes that continue and complicate the novel's emphasis on children's educations, how they are managed, and the impact that they can have on the world as it will become.
If you aren't interested in reading "Our Mutual Friend" yet, you should be! Clearly, my interests lay in the national and educational strains of the novel, but there's obviously so much more. Now, my knowledge of Dickens may be limited to the five or six novels I've read so far, but you will be hard pressed anywhere in Dickens, (or anywhere else for that matter), to find a more frenetic villain than Mr. Bradley Headstone - to see him in action alone makes this novel worth reading. He ranks right up there with "David Copperfield"s Uriah Heep in terms of Dickens's most insistently horrifying creations. Ok. Enough from me, go, read "Our Mutual Friend." What are you waiting for! Go, now!
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24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Jane Smiley Had it Right, May 14, 2003
I hadn't read Dickens in quite a while. Ten years had passed since I closed the cover of Bleak House and put it back on my bookshelf. But then I happened upon a recent biography of Dickens written by Jane Smiley (of all people). Being a huge fan of both author and subject, I picked it up. I won't review Ms. Smiley's book here (it's excellent, read it), but I was surprised to hear her heap such praise and adoration on this book. I'd heard of it and I knew it was one of Dickens' last works. But that was about all I knew, having limited my exposure to his "better known" works. Did "Our Mutual Friend" belong in the hallowed ranks of Dickens' best? I figured, a Pulitzer Prize winning author must know what she's talking about, right?
Well, she does. "Our Mutual Friend" is like a great meal at a fine restaurant. Chew slowly. Savor each bite. The beauty of this book is in its extraodinary and wonderful style of writing, delightful similes, vivid and uncanny character development (Dickens is the master, but he outdoes even himself in this work) and that odd sense you get when you close a masterpiece that you just had a once in a lifetime experience. The man can write!
Make no mistake, this is a tougher read than the earlier, more "Dickens-y" novels. But the characters are more rich, complex and interesting than in any other of his work. If you don't feel a sincere sense of mourning for Mr. Boffin's decline into miserism, and joy for...(well, I won't spoil the plot for you), then I can't help you. The caustically satiric language may be a shock to those used to the milder styles of Copperfield and Pickwick, but it is brilliant and I believe it is his best work. The grim story line is far from the lilting plot of a Nickleby, but it is gripping. I don't think I could name my "favorite" Dickens book. "Bleak House" and "Great Expectations" are up there. But "Our Mutual Friend" would certainly be a prime candidate.
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