Bleak House

Layered and lengthy tale of several families affected by a civil court case.

It is quite a 19th-century soap opera with romance, secrets, murder, and intrigue. So many characters. Rich, poor, young, old, nice, not-so-nice and so on. Parts of it were fun; there was dark humor and entertaining sub-plots.

Despite the sheer number of people to keep track of, Dickens kept it interesting most of the time. It amazed me that they all have well-developed personalities. It was like reading a Discworld book in that regard. I liked Bucket the best, a gentleman and cop combo that you don't see very often.

Esther Summerson was not my favorite heroine. She's so nice, and reasonable, and charitable and unassuming that it was ironically hard to like her.

Of all Dicken's books, this one in particular is on many “best book of all time” lists.

This was a book. I've never read anything quite like it. It occupies that rare, weird spot where I appreciate what Dickens was trying to do with it, I thought the concept was interesting and I acknowledge the impact the book did have on actual society at the time of its publication, but I can't decide if I personally enjoyed it and I certainly wouldn't give this as a blanket recommendation to just anyone.

In a nutshell, the crux of the plot lies in two conflicting wills disposing of a significant fortune. One favours a Mr Jarndyce, while the other favours his distant cousins, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone. Not wanting to sow discord, Mr Jarndyce takes in Ada and Richard as his wards while the legal battle between the wills is wrought. We see all this through the eyes of our sometime narrator, Esther Summerson, a girl whose parentage is unknown and was also left in Mr Jarndyce's care as his ward and brought up in a boarding school, from which she was asked to live with Ada as her companion.

This is only my third Dickens novel (and I haven't read him in years and years), so the writing style here was a huge problem for me. While I read a fair bit of classics, I still can't get used to the way Dickens writes. Bleak House has the advantage of having an unusual dash of humour that wasn't present in the other two Dickens novels I've read - I was surprised by how almost Wodehouse-ian the narrative sounded at some points. However, there were still a lot of convoluted sentences that required some re-reading to understand and as a result, I felt like I missed at least 20% of the important plot details by the time I had finished and had to supplement my reading with a quick gander through the Wikipedia synopsis. A quick example - while I'm not expecting anything so unpoetic as baldly stating, “He died.” Dickens chose to write this as “He began the world, but not this one. The world that sets this right.” It's not unintelligible, but it really is a hit-or-miss style of writing that could either bowl you over with how beautiful it is, or just make you go, “I'm sorry, what?!” I feel like I'm straddling the midway point there, and probably leaning a bit towards the latter.

Furthermore, the way this book was written was... phew. Thank goodness I read some GR reviews while I was about a quarter way through, which gave me an idea of what this book was meant to achieve. Bleak House, was apparently, Dickens's attempt to criticise the English legal system at the time for being long-winded, meandering, inefficient and bloated with unnecessary, irrelevant details. The way he chose to do it was to make the progress of Bleak House feel like a court case - long-winded, meandering, bloated with unnecessary, irrelevant details. In the first half of the book, I constantly felt like I had no idea what the hook of the story was. We kept switching perspectives between Esther's narrative, to third-person chapters of random scenes with apparently random characters. I much preferred Esther's thread because at least there was a semblance of a storyline to follow, whereas the third-person chapters felt so irrelevant that I probably skimmed quite a few of these.

Of course, Dickens finds a way to tie everything together in the end and some time in the second half, you realise that these random scenes and random characters are not quite so random after all. But I did have to persevere up to around the 65% mark before things started making a lot more sense and I was finally somewhat hooked. If I hadn't been reading this for a buddy read, I might quite likely have dropped the book some time in the first half though - waiting for the 65% mark before a long and meandering book starts to pull you in does seem to be asking too much for most readers unless they're already a huge fan of Dickens or are interested in the English legal system.

First Dickens in a very long time and I loved it. Loved the characters/caricatures, pacing was fine, descriptive passages rich and satisfying. Yes Esther is a saint but how can you not relish aMrs Jelleby, or old Smallweed, Inspector Bucket and old Turveydrop.