A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities
Author: Charles Dickens 1859 352 pp
My rating: 2*
Started February 10 2008, Finished March 20 2008

“Second rate Dickens” – Bernard Berkman

Bernard might have been a little overgenerous in this assessment. Would have scored even lower except for a couple of memorable set pieces, particularly the scene early on where the wine cask breaks in the street and the starving local inhabitants lap up the spillage from crannies in the cobblestones and suck it out of the mud. Virtually none of the characters is a believable human being, mostly being so one-dimensional that only three, the Monseigneur, Sidney Carton and Jerry Cruncher, are even interesting. The book’s biggest fault is the non-stop coincidences of propinquity that drive the plot – the ten or so major characters in the book, who hail from divergent social backgrounds and are of mixed nationality, all seem to have had numerous momentous encounters with each other over the years. Furthermore, several filler chapters support the claim of someone who told me that she had heard Dickens was paid by the word.