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“Amidst some fifteen major novels, most of them enchanting, the wondrously atypical Great Expectations and the typically wondrous Our Mutual Friend may be the two novels Dickens wrote that are flawless as well as enchanting. The gigantic cast all lock hands and interlink and move in tandem like clockwork, quite unlike the similarly vast dramatis personae of, say, the similarly brilliant Bleak House. That wonderful novel, by virtue of its great darkness and desolation, was one of the novels that led critics to wonder if Dickens would ever write as happily or kindly as of old. If Great Expectations brought back "the old Pickwick style" they wanted, then Our Mutual Friend, the very next novel, more than follows in its tradition. Its brand of humour is, to be sure, at times the blackest that Dickens ever produced, but it is giddy, buoyant and filled with love for its targets. All kinds of avarice, deceit, madness and murder populate the narrow streets and treacherous waterways of its London, and still I can't think of it as anything but a hopeful novel. There is pathos and anger and a measure of savagery in it but also, I think, a great deal of whimsy in this story of "money, money, money and what money can make of life". Money, old and new, is the pivot about which this novel's universe revolves, and as that universe turns it successively covets it, rejects it, hoards it, wastes it, glorifies and vilifies it. Money is all that the miserly Mr.Harmon leaves behind him and it is money for which his son is drugged and thrown, senseless, into the river; it is money that prompts the Thames watermen to creep slowly up and down its length, combing the waters for dead bodies; it is money that Bella Wilfer feels she must marry; it is money that damns every hope and love of heroic Lizzie Hexam's, and it is money which makes a spiteful blackmailer of the otherwise merely spiteful Silas Wegg. This frankly mercenary world is populated by, among others, the hilariously superficial Veneerings, the scheming, conniving, unloving Lammles, the insouciant, insolvent and irrepressibly witty Eugene Wrayburn, Mr.Harmon's loveable servants -- the Boffins -- who suddenly and bewilderedly inherit a hundred thousand pounds, the sepulchral and pricelessly funny Mrs.Wilfer, the crippled and indomitable dolls' dressmaker Jenny Wren, and the matchlessly creepy taxidermist Mr.Venus. If ever there has been a structure both bright and unremittingly real, it is this. We watch its characters, as we do those of so many of the earlier novels, from atop the great transparent glass house that contains them, but sin and depravity have not, as they have in Bleak House, festered and rotted the beams quite away. That mist of time, that gentle haze as of doubt and regret, which casts shadow and ambiguity over Great Expectations is not here. The great edifice does not conclude by crashing down catastrophically upon its shellshocked inmates, nor does it obscure the slightest detail, for good or worse, of their characters. In the end, no one is allowed the cowardice of slipping quietly away from life and the story, and no one is allowed any real secrets: a strange sort of compact is made between them, pledging them to truth and bravery. Money or no money, life is a thing that must be weathered, and truth and bravery have miraculous sustaining power.”