3 of 3 members found this review helpful.
““Bleak House’ is generally agreed to be Dickens’ greatest work, and I constantly go back and forth with myself as to whether or not to agree or to champion “Our Mutual Friend” instead. I think it's ultimately a draw. Both novels are akin in their darkness of vision; each offers a truly fallen cosmos, although with “Bleak House” Dickens truly does seem to capture Victorian England in its Self, from the dazzling glass halls of its aristocracy to the Kafkaesque corridors of Chancery to the phantasmagoria of the London slums, every character connected by a strand of the web. In my memory, “Bleak House’ always seems to take place at night; its atmosphere is furtive, secret, whispered. It’s also probably the very first whodunit in literature (except perhaps for a few short stories of Poe’s), and the wonderful Mr. Bucket is the great-grandfather of all inspector-sleuths as he unravels the mystery of the incomparable Lady Dedlock, that pitiful prisoner frozen behind a carnival mask, tormented in her own self-made circle of Hell, with Mr. Tulkinghorn to keep the fires stoked.
I think my favorite characters in all of Dickens are John Jarndyce and Esther Summerson. Jarndyce, a true bodhisattva as Seymour Glass might say, is the greatest of Dickens’ avatars of human kindness. He is always aware of the fragility of goodness, that it requires choice, and one senses that with him it’s learned behavior, that he has very personal reasons to shudder when “the wind is in the East.” And Esther Summerson is quite simply perfection. It is for this reason, I think, that she seems to enrage modern readers. Shrewdly intelligent, wise, discerning, generous, keenly sensible of the rarity of love and therefore humbly grateful when it comes her way…she quietly admonishes us all.
”