After reading A Christmas Carol, I became convinced that Charles Dickens was one of the greatest writers in the English language... and after branching out a bit and reading A Tale of Two Cities, I'm still pretty sure of it.
I just wish Dickens weren't so long-winded all the time.
It took me a while to get into A Tale of Two Cities, mostly because, from my point of view, it took a long time to get to the point where the plot elements introduced actually started to MATTER. That said, Dickens creates some fantastic characters (I was especially fond of the banker, Mr. Lorry), and his prose, as always, was a delight to read. I fell in love with a particular passage describing the employees of a cerain London bank:
Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon
him.
It's a completely insignificant passage, yet it's so unique and so vividly descriptive that I actually re-read it a couple of times.
Also, I started craving cheese.
Of course, Dickens's engaging prose sometimes gets the best of him, and he often pulls the brake on the prose so he can editorialize for a bit (for crying out loud, he names one of the vengeful leaders of the French Revolution "Vengeance"). There were times when I wanted to grab Mr. Dickens by his froofy scarf, shake him violently, and yell, "TOO SUBTLE!"
I doubt he'd appreciate the irony.
Getting to the end of the book proved to be a chore - I knew where the plot was going and how everything would be wrapped up 100 pages before the end, so I felt little motivation to finish. Still, I haven't been turned off to Dickens, and I'll probably pick up another of his books soon.
