When I first created this blog, I held a single idea that would make it readable. I would review every book I read, more or less without discrimination, and the reviews that mattered most would sort themselves to the top. Ideally, there would emerge, unintentionally, a handful of books nobody else has bothered to write much about, and I would help people by adding my fifty cents to the Google bin.
Of course there's a catch. In order for that to work out properly, I review everything I read, including work that already has its fair share of attention. So, forgive me if I occasionally don a literary hat a few sizes too large.
I present to you: A Tale of Two Cities.
It's the late eighteenth century, and Western Europe is cooking up a ruckus. The rich are swallowing up all they can and leaving everyone else with nothing, which results in a state of near-anarchy outside of mansions and manors. Men and women must distrust everyone they see on the street. Lucie Manette, a French teenager, journeys to the Defarge wine shop in order to recover her old father, a physician who, when under great stress, hallucinates that he is a shoemaker. Lucie brings her father safely to England, where her presence restores his mind and the two aid in the acquittal of Charles Darnay, a French nobleman who has sworn off his aristocracy and his allegiance to either country's elite. But unbeknownst to the Manettes and Darnay, Madame Defarge and her husband are stirring the oppressed French people into a national revolution gone wrong; when the power balance finally crumbles, nobody is safe from a new invention and embodiment of mob justice: the guillotine.
My surface impression of this book is that, more than anything I've ever read, it resembles a Disney film. We start with a simplistic, emotional landscape of historical romanticism, followed by the strong damsel with whom everybody is going to fall in love. There's a father figure, some crowd scenes that could make one or two lovely musical numbers, and an evil woman with a relatively ambiguous plan and some humorously animated, wicked facial expressions (Dickens repeatedly describes Madame Defarge's eyebrows). Two characters fall in love, while the villains storm the Bastille and do lots of violent things to nonspecific people. Then by some twist of fate, one of our protagonists winds up in the villain's clutches, and it's up to all of his spunky friends to save him at the last second.
Of course, Dickens came first, and this is no criticism. It's also important to read the book as a novel and not as a historical text. These characters never existed, but they make great analogies for problems that have survived the French Revolution. If I'm a sucker for any trope, it's for average characters who are caught between two dangerous ideologies. The notion of a wealthy elite that steps on everybody else is common, easy to understand, and probably won't ever go away. But its sinister counterpart, the people who can justify their sins and violence by the fact that they have been wronged, is more important to unravel because it applies to more of us. Sure, Charles Darnay is heroic by refusing to be Evrémonde, but see how few poor people resist sweeping France with violence. Dickens warns about possible side-effects of reaction, which at its heart can be little more than personal resentment.
I've met people who find Dickens' style to be boring or overwhelming. Neither was the case for me in this, my first Dickens book. Most of his prose is simply descriptive, but not boring, and he strays from it only for key points of heightened tension, or for sarcasm. It's droll British sarcasm, but this only makes it better.
I enjoyed this read quite a bit, beyond simply checking it off my list of books other people have read that I haven't. Its success as my first post-college classic proves to me that re-education is never a thing of the past.
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