A Tale of Two Cities, book review. (Charles Dickens)

I am not a big reader of the classics, in fact this is only my forth Dickens: Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol (which I adore) being the others, and at first I found this hard going but, stubborn as I am when it comes to finishing books, I took a break and reread the first fifty pages or so and was, on second acquaintance, hooked.

The premise is a simple one of love, but as with so many love stories there are twists and turns. France is in the grip of revolution, blood is being spilt and the mere whisper in the ear of an official can find you in the stocks or worse, visiting the guillotine; so if you're an aristocrat, you're better off out of it and, as it happens, Charles Darnay is one such chap, who has just beaten a spying charge in a London court when he takes a fancy to the beautiful Lucie Manette.

Her love however, is bequeathed to another, reserved wholly for her father, Alexandre Manette, who was lost to her for many years. Only when she and the local bank manager, Jarvis Lorry (who become firm friends) got wind of his whereabouts from Manette's former servant and now bar owner, Ernest Defarge and his wife, did they manage to rescue him from his madness and shoe making in a Paris loft.

So lost was he - he'd lost all his faculties from being imprisoned in the bastille for years - that it took all of Lucie and Jarvis's strength and fortitude to nurse him back to health and as the months pass and Alexandre begins to embrace his new calm and peaceful life in London, comforted and looked after by friends and family - his daughter being the most dedicated - life takes a turn for the better; his daughter is to be married.

The writing here is as you would expect it to be: old school, which I both like and don't.

I like the use of old words, words that we no longer hear, and when people speak they do so with such delicacy and courtesy, even when they're being mean or threatening, and it all helps transport you back over two hundred years, to when the book is set. What I'm not so keen on is how the use of the archaic English language interrupts the flow of the narrative and had me flicking back and forth to see what I had missed.

As with a lot of Dickens' books, when first published, A Tale of Two Cities was serialised over many weeks, and I wondered if this was why I found it a bit disjointed.

The first few chapters are very atmospheric, and as I've said above, once understood, carry you on and into the rest of the story with pace but it is the ending, the last quarter of the book if you will, that I think seals its place in the annals of time; for it is here, having been lured back to France, that Charles Darnay is arrested and imprisoned for being an aristocrat. Along with Lucie, her father and Miss Pross (Lucie's governess) they attempt to win his case, but on release, he is rearrested on a trumped up charge. The Defarges - the bar owners who so kindly looked after Lucie's father when he was lost making shoes - have turned, put the word out about Darnay's roots, and shown their true tricolours.

The, 'will they, won't they,' tug of war over whether the jury will find him innocent a second time or have him condemned to Madam Guillotine, the behind the scene scheming by the tricoteuses, (a group of women who knit the names of those who should be executed into shrouds, Madam Defarge being their self-appointed leader) and the bloodlust of a baying crowds, is all in contrast to the peaceful and mellow existence the family had enjoyed in London, and it turns the pages quicker than you know.

So to sum up: Once I got my mind around the language - yes I know, it's written in English but that's like saying, Train Spotting is written in Scottish - this book thoroughly entertained. There is love, reunion and life, opposing hatred, destruction and death and there is atmosphere (and we all know how much I love atmosphere) along with a few more tranquil moments, and then there's the ultimate sacrifice, the giving of one's life for another, but that would be giving the game away so you'll have to check this one out for yourselves.

Three and a half stars.

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