I've stewed over this review for a while. Like many people out there in the wilds of the internet, I have difficulty separating this novel from the rest of Pratchett's oeuvre, which has had a defining influence on my development, both as a reader and as a person. While I enjoyed reading the book very much, the experience was not unproblematic for me, so it took me a while to digest my feelings and come out with a coherent sense of what I thought about it. The gist of it is that I found it good, but different.
Dodger is from the Nation school of Pratchett novels: optimistic to a fault, self-indulgent in its degree of wish-fulfillment. It reminds me of the idealistic narrative of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc created by Alex in Goodbye Lenin: well-intentioned, but ultimately silly. And yet, I can’t begrudge Pratchett the relentless series of serendipitous happy endings that is Dodger.
The novel is set in a fictitious but well-researched Dickensian London, and features both Dodger, the character from Oliver Twist, and Charlie Dickens himself, imagined as an investigative journalist. Other famous Victorians make appearances, including a young Benjamin Disraeli, Henry Mayhew champion of the poor, and Queen Victoria herself. Sweeney Todd, demon barber of Fleet Street, makes a cameo appearance, acting as the foil for Dodger’s change of circumstances, and instigating a discussion of mental illness and the way it is handled by society.
The plot is a little bit flabby – Dodger rescues a young Lady from some very unpleasant gentlemen, which motivates his meteoric rise through the echelons of Victorian society, achieved as a result of a series of convenient coincidences following his kind disarming of Sweeney Todd. There are rather a lot of coincidences, much like in a Dickens novel, but these are revealed too gradually to have any kind of effect. On the other hand, there is something delightful about the delicate web of references to the urban mythology of London: to use the example of Sweeney Todd again, at the moment when Dodger walks into a barbershop on Fleet Street, I experienced a thrill of recognition, followed by surprise at the way the narrative subverts the myth, bringing in the issue of soldiers’ unimaginable experience of civilian life after the battlefield.
Nevertheless, the weakness in plotting persists: the mystery side of the plot is too veiled in, well, mystery, to be effective. Dodger has a plan to rescue his Lady-friend permanently by somehow staging her death, but the details of his plan are left unexplained until it actually fails. This does not allow dramatic tension to build while he is attempting to carry out his plan, because the reader doesn’t know exactly what to expect, so one can’t be surprised. Having said that, there were probably references to other London novels that I missed, which may make the whole situation more clear. I also felt like the ‘Happy Families’ game could have had a more clear function within the plot – the mysterious rescued girl has a pack of the cards in her possession, but her explanation of why is, although sweet, somewhat anticlimactic.
Dodger is different from Discworld: the jokes are more literary than situational, the plot is looser, and the overall experience is different. It seems that the subject of the novel is not the rescue of the damsel in distress, or the transformation of a street child into a gentleman, or the mysterious identity of the mystery assassin; rather, it is Dodger himself who constitutes the core of the narrative. The interest lies chiefly in observing his reactions to new experiences, involving rich people, firearms and heavenly soft unmentionables (underwear, for those unfamiliar with the term). The whole novel is a deliciously divine pursuit of a series of ‘what ifs’. What if Sweeney Todd had been misunderstood? What if a woman in desperate need of help had got it, for once? What if Dickens’ Dodger had been given the choice between good and indifferent, in the face of pure evil? What if under his grimy clothes and sporadic education he had a truly powerful moral compass?
All quibbling aside, this is one of those books that left me feeling inexplicably better about the world and humanity at large when I had finished it, which is what I have always loved about Pratchett’s writing. I didn’t giggle through it like I do with most Discworld novels, but it often made me smile, and I finished it feeling an even deeper affection than before for the man who wrote it.
No comments:
Post a Comment