Book review
Reading experience: Firstly I want to summarize and write about how I felt about the readings. Actually, I have read through this book (English edition) before and found some difficulty in fully understanding the masterwork, because there were so many words I didn’t know and plenty of structures which were not clear enough for me to figure out. So this summer vacation I read it over again with reference to a Chinese edition translated by Song Zhaolin and I benefited a lot.
Plot arrangement: The author Charles Dickens made an exquisite arrangement of the overall plot. He didn’t record the story in chronological order. Instead, he combined order and flashback in time and toggled between London and Paris in space.
He started the book with a comment on the period (Book I chapter 1) to set the social background as a stage for the characters’ words and behaviors. As he put up at the beginning, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only”.
Then the first part (Book I chapter 2- 6) narrated how poor Doctor Manette was saved and recalled to life by his daughter Lucie and his old friend Mr. Lorry, but ignored everything about why Doctor Manette was imprisoned in Bastille for eighteen years and now was in the garret of the Defarges, which formed a suspense and functioned as a foreshadowing as well.
Book II began with the court trial in London of Charles Darnay who was charged with Treason (Book II chapter 1- 6) which happened 5 years later and involved Doctor Manette, Lucie, Sydney Carton, Mr. Stryver, Mr. Lorry in the case. These souls met each other and their paths had actually crossed.
From chapter 7 to chapter 9, the story was built around monseigneur in town and the country who was a mirror of the arrogant but worthless class, the deaf city and the dumb age. He let the carriage dash through the streets and sweep around corners and consider nothing of the life in rags who were miserably not dare to rebel, because “So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised” (Book II chapter 7), “My husband die of want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want” (Book II chapter 8). In addition, his nephew was the man known as Charles Darnay in England. Although there were ties of relatedness, one of them still wore a fine mask but the other tried to figure out the purpose and secrets of him. And through their dialogue, it wasn’t difficult to speculate that the monseigneur had used a letter de cachet would to send someone to some fortress indefinitely before when he was not in disgrace with the Court.
From chapter 10 on, new stories gradually developed and unfolded while the secrets and mysteries were uncovered as well. Considering the size and complexity, I won’t list them here.
Characters: Let me talk about some characters then.
Mr. Jarvis Lorry was a businessman working in Tellson’s bank. What he often talked about were “it’s a business” “I’m a businessman”. He always tried just observing and being only a bystander, which was stopped every time by his sympathy and compassion, like his caring for Miss Manette and Doctor Manette and his advice for Mr. Stryver and so on so forth.
Lucie was a maiden who could be bestowed on every good words-- caring, kind, beautiful, elegant, etc. And she was favored by two gentlemen who resembled with each other in appearance but were poles apart in temperament.
Charles Darnay was a decent gentleman. His confession “'Our family; our honourable family, whose honour is of so much account to both of us, in such different ways. Even in my father's time, we did a world of wrong, injuring every human creature who came between us and our pleasure, whatever it was. Why need I speak of my father's time, when it is equally yours? Can I separate my father's twin-brother, joint inheritor, and next successor, from himself'” (Book II chapter 9) fully revealed his responsibility, sympathy, wisdom and compassion. And he loved Lucie “fondly, dearly, disinterestedly, devotedly”(Book II chapter 10). Their falling in love was not only romantic but also fortunate at that period.
Sydney Carton thought himself as incorrigible, and “it is too late for that. I shall never be better than I am. I shall sink lower, and be worse”(Book II chapter 13). He loved Lucie deeply but he knew he was not the right person who could give her happiness. So after his confession to Lucie, he took a step backwards and kept a friendship with her. He also promised that “For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you”(Book II chapter 13). It turned out that he kept true to his words; he sacrificed himself to save Mr. Darnay in the end. He was such an affectionate lover.
Mrs. Defarge devoted herself to avenging for her family. She was so hostile to the aristocracy that she joined the revolution; she was so bitterly hated the monseigneur that she insisted sending Charles Darnay to the guillotine. She was so deeply influenced by her childhood experience that she was blinded by hared.
Besides these single characters, the author did well in describing the group images. I extract some paragraphs as follows. “All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud embankments' to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence” (Book I chapter 1); “All the human breath in the place, rolled at him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces strained round pillars and corners, to get a sight of him; spectators in back rows stood up, not to miss a hair of him; people on the floor of the court, laid their hands on the shoulders of the people before them, to help themselves, at anybody's cost, to a view of him—stood a-tiptoe, got upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to see every inch of him” (Book II chapter 2).
Theme: Love and sacrifice are the ways of salvation. Carton and Mrs. Defarge both had a miserable childhood. Carton indulged himself to be dispirited and decadent and Mrs. Defarge immersed herself into hatred and hostility. Mrs. Defarge was sank in hatred and she couldn’t forgive Darnay and must kill his life. The hatred had already distorted her soul. But for Carton, fortunately, met Lucie who gave him respect and care and lit the light in his heart. So, in the end Carton chose to sacrifice himself on the altar of her happiness for the rest of her life. The ending “'It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to then I have ever known'” (Book III chapter 15) was lingering around just like his devoted love. It was Carton’s love that astonished and moved and inspired numerous readers; it was Carton’s love that made the book.
Writing style: As to the writing style, satire runs through the lines. Charles was a master of irony who could express a quite opposite attitude when recording something down to earth in a serious way through the contrast and varieties of details. What impressed me most was a description in “monseigneur in town” (Book II chapter 7)-- Yes. It took four men, all four a-blaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur's lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two. Besides, the author made great use of rhetorical devices especially metaphors. For example, in theses lines of “He had no opportunity of saying, or so much as thinking, anything else, until he was clear of the Old Bailey; for, the crowd came pouring out with a vehemence that nearly took him off his legs, and a loud buzz swept into the street as if the baffled blue-flies were dispersing in search of other carrion” (Book II chapter 3), he compared the mass as blue-flies, while the case which aroused their interest as carrion. So the image of the apathetic mass who were in pursuit of something cruel and fun to please themselves came alive on the paper.
A number of foreshadowing and hints were inserted on occasions. “That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the château as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to him that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked ruins. As for the roof he vaunted, he might have found that shutting out the sky in a new way—to wit, for ever, from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead was fired, out of the barrels of a hundred thousand muskets” (Book II chapter 9). “It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified, and it stopped him, for no voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of thunder and lightning broke with that sweep of water, and there was not a moment’s interval in crash, and fire, and rain, until after the moon rose at midnight” (Book II chapter 6); the storm symbolizes the revolution, and everyone was in its grip that no sound was to be heard which drove the mass crazy.
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