Book of the Week: A Tale of Two Cities

**Charles Dickens is by most accounts one of the greatest novelists of all time. You already know that though, scholars aren’t shy about professing their love for Charlie. We’re often told how fantastic and gripping his story-telling is, how he helped refine what we understand to be the definition of the novel and how without Mr Dickens, the face of modern literature may be very different indeed.**

So naturally, with Dickens’ birthday this week, people are chatting a lot about the idea of ‘the modern novel’, whatever that really means. People have been talking about why exactly his books are so brilliant, and why it is that he’s so well respected. (Well, people I know are. Maybe your friends aren’t because you have social lives or whatever, that’s fine.) And so I’ve been wondering: what is it that makes a novel great?

I was on a date a couple of weeks ago and, as with all first dates, the conversation started off a little laboured (“By all means, tell me in excruciatingly painful detail about all of your brothers and sisters! What’s that, you have seven siblings? Say, maybe I will take that glass of wine, and also, do you have any anthrax?)” But as with all twenty-something discourse, we quickly fell comfortably into the safety zone of talking about our choice of degree. His undergrad’ in Mechanical Engineering Technology was admittedly somewhat of a stumbling block (there was no second date) but English Literature as usual, provided much safer ground.

Picture the scene:

“Ah,” he gasps, relieved to finally have something to say other than ‘can you please pass the breadsticks’, “English, huh? You must really read a lot!” I try not to throw a bottle of olive oil at him and scream, “Of course I read a-fucking-lot, you unstoppable moron,” and instead do my best to smile and nod, “Mmm, yeah, I suppose I do, not as much as I watch re-runs of ‘Sabrina the Teenage Witch’ though,” I chuckle. After we’ve both finished not laughing at my joke, he pulls out the old classic, “So, what’s your favourite book, then?” “’A Tale of Two Cities’,” I reply automatically, grateful that starters have finally arrived and so I have something else to do than talk to him. “How come?” “Oh, it’s just brilliant,” I reply, mouth full of sushi, wondering how convincingly I can fake my own death in Wagamama’s. “I don’t read a lot,” he muses (I did tell you there was no second date), “I don’t really know what makes a ‘brilliant book’.” “Oh well, it’s… Er… I think, personally…” I have no idea. I have been stumped. I am rarely lost for words, and I consider myself an ardent reader (I also consider myself an ardent wanker for using that turn of phrase) but I suddenly realise that not only do I have no idea why I love ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ so much, but I also have no idea what it is I look for in a novel.

Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking: mainly about my failed love life, but more importantly about what it is that makes Dickens’ account of pre-revolutionary Paris so inspiring, and by George, I think I’ve got it.

Dickens’ brilliance isn’t just in his amazing stories, or prolific adventures, it’s in his ability to create characters who make us believe in the power of change. I think on some level we’re all desperate to believe that no matter what mistakes we make there’s always a chance to redeem ourselves.

Sydney Carton is a man redeemed by his love for Lucie Manette and his ultimate death. Whether or not we subscribe to the view that Dickens intended for Carton’s death to be redemptive, we surely have to agree that in his own self-sacrifice Carton becomes a hero, even Christ-like, and that he lives through those he sacrificed himself for. Carton begins the novel without a single positive attribute to his name: he’s lazy, he’s self-involved, he’s an alcoholic – he tells us so often how much he loathes his own existence that by extension we loathe him too. Perhaps it’s a little depressing that only in his death can he finally achieve true change, but in his long walk to the guillotine he sees “the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself”. Carton transforms from a man with no self-awareness or compassion to someone who can see the bigger picture so clearly he will give his own life for it. He has purpose, he has determination and what do any of us want more than that? Okay, yes, I suppose we’d like to get to live at the end of our stories, but you can’t have it all, can you?

So maybe that’s what I look for in a novel, maybe that’s what makes fiction great: an affirmation of the belief that no matter how badly we screw things up, people will always love us in the end.