Tale of Two Cities

Well it took me a while, but I finished it for the second time in my life.  The first being in high school AP English.  Of course this is one of the many great books that is wasted on stupid teenagers.  In total, my Dickens resume includes Great Expectations, Hard Times, Tale of Two Cities, and A Christmas Carol.  They are all brilliant of course, but I think that Tale of Two Cities is by far the most action packed, so much so that it could almost be considered a war book.  The chapter about the storming of the Bastille sounds like a longer version of Charge of the Light Brigade.  This was my favorite part out of that chapter, I still remember the imagery striking me when I first read it at seventeen:

"As a whirlpool of boiling water has a centre point, so all this raging circled around Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the cauldron had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself, already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms, thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed on to arm another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar."

Of course it has the powerful imagery, deep character development, and highly developed plot that all the rest of his work has.  It started from an obscure point and over the span of a couple of decades, bring the story fully round and ties in the the beginning, such as the end of Dr. Monette's imprisonment and later the cause behind it that dooms Darnay. It pulls obscure observations and characters from any point in the story and makes them relevant (Carton's resemblance to Darnay at the trial that saves Darnay, then later saves him again, the wood sawyer that is a spy, etc.).  It describes the violence of the revolution so well that you believe that Dickens saw it himself, which of course he didn't.  These are the things that make Dickens, in my opinion, the best plot man in all of literature.  Then of course there is the portrayal of the civilized British afloat in the sea of French barberry (never mind that the British were going to draw and quarter Darnay for treason).  And the end fight between Madam Defage and Ms. Pross is the perfect good Brit versus evil Frenchie ending.   It makes you feel proud to be British, even when you are not British.

One of the extra things that made reading this book interesting was the actual book itself, which was my mother's copy when she took senior English in 1966.  It has her name written on the spine and the back cover has definitions of certain terms in the book, such as "Old Bailey".  Also written in her handwriting on the side of the last page is  my dad's name, "Johnny".  I have no idea why.  I do know that you will never see that with an E-book, no matter how great they are for the state of reading.