That I associate with Sydney Carton was only one of several sorrows Dickens inflicted on me. The moment I turned the back cover of "A Tale of Two Cities", I had this overwhelming guilt that I had been sinning against English literature all these years. I reckon many others must have felt the same way. Was this why it took me ten years to read that book? As a young girl of eleven, I had got bored with the first carriage journey and had shut the book up, only to open it again years later.
Any attempt to praise the book or comment on it will be stupid on my part, as I am well aware of my literary expertise. I would rather keep it more of a personal observation.
I saw the movie first, fell in love with that last dialogue of Carton's and read the book only to see how that line came about. If I love sketching characters, Dickens is the master of my love. Each character is complete and whole. One is left wondering at the deep analysis and synthesis of the human mind and emotions that Dickens displays. And yet the plot is so woven that the people in the story seem to be like leaves floating over a river in flood. The story blankets them all - be it the doctor looking at the moon beyond the bars, Darnay renouncing his blood, Carton crying with his face hidden, Lucy holding together a family or Jerry sitting on a stool - no one rises above the story. At one point I thought that such an amazing story and plot did not necessarily need such extremely well made characters. I was wrong. Only at the very end, all characters fit perfectly the way Dickens created them. They could not have existed in any other way. The Guillotine that separates Carton's head from his body seems to join every element in the pages, however small. The behavior of the character never slips. Each person is as complete as if Dickens himself had lived as that person.
The guillotine itself appears as a character throughout the novel. It is an active force, a living entity and a drive throughout the book. This powerful and purposeful rendition of an inanimate object gives the story that power over the reader, where he is compelled to obey the story and not let his imagination drive him in any other direction. It appears as that secret master who commands without being known. It rules over the hearts and minds of the men who feed it; and its hunger only becomes greater. It is the promise of freedom, as long as it is master. Somewhere in the subtext, I saw that there is no real freedom; there is a change of slavery. The guillotine is the new master, it kills the cruel royalty only to replace it. The guillotine was the mother of today's democracies, and look at them. They promised freedom too, and haven't they brought in new slavery.
Political discourse was not the object of this piece of writing; so let me come back. Apart from all the main people in the novel, one that particularly interested me was Jerry Cruncher. There is so much mystery around him, but he is at the same time such a small, simple person, that all mystery seems superfluous. Only till he opens his mouth about Roger Cly. And then he fits in. How does he live the way he does? How does he combine his days at the bank to his nightly grave digging? How does he feel when his son asks him about fishing? What does he think of his wife, and of her prayers? Jerry, where did Charles Dickens pick you from? Jerry was the reason I began to re-read the book as soon as I had finished it.
In those last pages, one gets that very rare feeling of completing a story, of continuity of time and conclusion of an event.
............................. conttd. ...........................
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