Where It Wore Me Out

The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I thought it was some heavy going, tbh.

I've come around some on Dickens; things I once found dry as dirt can now seem charming and goofy and moderately humorous. And most of his novels have characters I can care about and hope to see have a happy ending. You root for David Copperfield or Pip or Oliver Twist, and some of his books can evoke strong feelings. I even shed a tear or two reading A Tale of Two Cities.

But this book tried my patience. It is about nothing. It's more about nothing than any book I've ever read. Some guys hang out. They go to some places. They meet some people and get invited to their place. They drink--all the time they drink--and eat some stuff.

Somebody says I have a story, and we hear the story, even if it has nothing to do with anything else in the book. (A couple of the stories were significantly more entertaining than the main plot. The ghost story set in warehouse of old carriages was actually pretty cool.)

So what's the plot? What do they want to do? What is anybody's intention? Goal? Purpose? Is there a plot in the normal sense? (My opinion is no, unless you're willing to stretch the definition of plot a long way.)

Dickens always includes a lot of nonsense, partly for the sake of satire and partly (I suspect) to pad his word count. He likes to belabor meaningless incidents and transcribe every word in every pointless conversation. It's in all his books. He really liked having minor characters talking about random stuff, especially if they have impenetrable accents. I think it's meant to be funny, and I expect there are people who actually find it funny, but I never ever ever ever do. I try to work though it patiently to get to the parts that matter in my estimation, but that pointless nonsense is the heart of this novel. If you took out the eating and drinking and irrelevant conversations, the book would be about 50 pages.

I liked his servant, who was smarter than everybody else and did some good stuff while nobody was looking. He was more often entertaining, and his contribution let me give this a barely-passing 3 in good conscience. And I liked the happy endings, though I could not tell any of the minor characters apart enough to care who was Wardle or Winkle or Tubman or Snodgrass. It didn't really matter, though. That was the problem.

This was an early work, and he makes enough adjustments to let me enjoy his later writing more. I found this pretty hard to like.

Not recommended unless you really love Dickens in general.

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