On The Other Hand

[poliphilo]

On the other hand, "fun, likable, clever" isn't really what I look for in fiction. I want to be astonished, amazed, transported. Dickens will do that to a person. So will Charlotte Bronte. Writers who faithfully render that limited range of experience we call "reality" interest me much less- even when they're wonderfully sharp and witty about it.

Comments

[halfmoon_mollie1]

Yes. Very much so. I think that's one of the reasons I like fantasy. I can get lost in it, and it doesn't have to be (and seldom IS) about reality.

[poliphilo]

Do you know Josiah Bancroft's Books of Babel? I finished the final volume earlier this year. They're pretty fantastical.

[halfmoon_mollie1]

I will add those to my list! thank you.

[mallorys_camera]

I'm more keyed to language and style than I am to plot. 😀

[poliphilo]

Me too.

Look at Dickens, his plots are mostly crap. You really don't read him to find out what happens next. I mean who gives a toss whether the characterless hero gets to marry the even more characterless heroine? You read him for the characters, for the set pieces, for the surreal dialogue, for things like, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times."

[mallorys_camera]

Dickens is a really fabulous stylist!!!! 😀

[poliphilo]

Yes!

When he really cuts loose there's no one to touch him!

[cmcmck]

Near to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe abuts, where the buildings on the banks are dirtiest and the vessels on the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of close-built low-roofed houses, there exists the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of its inhabitants.

'Beyond Dockhead, in the Borough of Southwark, stands Jacob's Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet deep and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in, once called Mill Pond, but known in the days of this story as Folly Ditch. It is a creek or inlet from the Thames, and can always be filled at high water by opening the sluices at the Lead Mills from which it took its old name. At such times, a stranger, looking from one of the wooden bridges thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see the inhabitants of the houses on either side lowering from their back doors and windows, buckets, pails, domestic utensils of all kinds, in which to haul the water up; and when his eye is turned from these operations to the houses themselves, his utmost astonishment will be excited by the scene before him. Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it, as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch.

'In Jacob's Island, the warehouses are roofless and empty; the walls are crumbling down; the windows are windows no more; the doors are falling into the streets; the chimneys are blackened, but they yield no smoke. Thirty or forty years ago, before losses and chancery suits came upon it, it was a thriving place; but now it is a desolate island indeed. The houses have no owners; they are broken open, and entered upon by those who have the courage; and there they live, and there they die. They must have powerful motives for a secret residence, or be reduced to a destitute condition indeed, who seek a refuge in Jacob's Island.


When Dickens does it, he does it SO well! It was a real place and it feels real.

[poliphilo]

He's in a class of his own.