Book Review: Bleak House by Charles Dickens

This is the absolute longest time I have ever taken to finish and read a book. My last book review was posted three months ago! Just a few days back I had almost decided to give this one up and start on another – but something told me that I must finish it. And so after three days of furious reading, “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens is complete. I finish it with mixed feelings so here they are:Book Review – Bleak House by Charles Dickens

The Good

First and foremost, this book is an incisive commentary on the legal system in general. It is of particular relevance to India as it is today because I found many similarities between the two. It illustrates how a person’s entire life can be consumed and wasted away in a lawsuit which will ultimately end up sucking dry all the parties concerned. The best way to deal with it is to distance yourself from it as much as possible and not get too involved. One of the most promising, energetic, cheerful and good-natured individuals in the book is slowly corrupted and perverted and stripped of all his good qualities by an interminable lawsuit that drags on and on forever.

And of course there is that which makes Charles Dickens such a great writer. His auxiliary characters are simply amazing. So colorful – each one illustrating a specific personality trait that defines them. From the boisterous people who boast about their charity and do little else, to the pompous fat man whose sole purpose in life is to posture and inflate his ego. All of us have met such people at sometime or the other and it’s amazing to see Dickens portray them so accurately.

The Bad

Unfortunately, this book has a lot of negatives which is one of the reasons why I took so long to finish it. The most conspicuous flaw is the bland nature of its principal characters. They are simply too one-sided. The principal narrator, a woman called Esther Summerson is what is called in literary criticisms as a “Mary Sue”. She’s too perfect, too self-effacing, too ridiculously well mannered, charming, kind and humble. It’s quite sickening actually. I have very rarely seen such a one-sided character as Esther in any book. She gets tiresome really fast.

And she’s not the only one. The overwhelming majority of the main characters are like this. Only a few display a more varied countenance like Sir Leicester Dedlock, Mr. Harold Skimpole and Mrs. Flite. The rest of them are simply too good to be true.

There are many threads to the story, and consequently the pace can be a little slow at times. I’ve read enough of Dickens to recognize that his primary way of resolving plots is to somehow link up people  in the story so that everyone is related in some way or the other. In this, he relies far too much on coincidence to further along the story. Maybe because I’ve seen it happen so many times in his books.

I’m glad I finally finished this. I came perilously close to casting it away and starting on something more interesting and engaging. But there’s enough good in it for me to be glad that I read it anyway.