Gentle Readers will be aware that I am a huge fan of the novels of Charles Dickens, and may deduce that I am a fan of Victorian Novels generally. No, Gentle Readers will probably have noted the utter lack of non-Dickensian VNs in this Tohu Bohu, because, you know, I’ve blogged everything I’ve read for years. And I haven’t felt the need to re-read Vanity Fair or any of Anthony Trollope’s stuff or Thomas Hardy’s. I’m more inclined to read the late-Victorian (or actually Edwardian) stuff. And until this summer, I had never read anything by George Eliot.
Believe or not, I picked up Felix Holt: the Radical based on a positive note about it I read on the blog of some conservative or libertarian site. I don’t remember which one, nor what in the name of G.K. Chesterton I was doing there, but the note about Felix Holt was clearly written and had enough in it to make me thing that I should pick it up and fill my Eliot gap. The things that blogger liked about it were not necessarily the things that I would like, but the description of Ms. Eliot’s interests, style and subject, and for that matter of the books’ flaws, intrigued me. And I liked the book. So that’s all right, Best Beloved, d’y’see?
I might uncharitably describe the book as halfway between Mr. Dickens and Mr. Trollope, with the defects of both and the genius of neither. I do think that it is insufficiently Dickensian for fans of Mr. Dickens’ stuff (such as YHB), and that it is probably too Dickensian for fans of Mr. Trollope’s. There are people who dislike plot twists, improbable coincidences, meetings and partings and sudden inheritances. Some of that is simply taste, although it is often to my annoyance couched as if it were not, as if somebody watching a juggler vents that it’s a wildly inefficient and unnatural method of carrying balls and pins and scarves, which nobody would ever carry together in real life anyway. No, no they wouldn’t. Not the point. Go watch somebody push a shopping cart; that’s real life for you. Still, there’s juggling and there’s juggling, and Ms. Eliot is juggling stoneware jugs and pint mugs, slowly and carefully, whilst Mr. Dickens juggles flaming torches and cleavers and an apple and that other thing, and probably a cat as well, and does so while wearing big shoes and riding a unicycle and singing Jerusalem, and, you know, making jokes whenever he drops something, which is pretty often.
Digression: I feel awkward referring to George Eliot as miz, but cannot manage to refer to her as mister, nor do I want to refer to her as Mary Ann Evans. Most bloggers would not have written themselves into this corner by dogged insistence on some sort of honorific. End Digression
I’m surprised this book has not been adapted for a miniseries. It’s right up Masterpiece’s alley. One stately home and one manor house. An older women with A Secret, acting up the sort of quiet storm that goes well with lush music. A pretty girl with two young suitors, one a rich aristocrat and the other a poor watchmaker. Two or three great crowd scenes, including a riot that leaves two people dead. A trial. A villainous lawyer. And lots of dollops of educational whatsit about the Reform Law and elections in eighteenth-century England for the Alistair Cookie to explain at the top of the show. Or whoever is hosting the thing these degenerate days. Of course now there are plenty of other possibilities, with combinations of English and American networks putting up the money. I found myself, as I do with these things, trying to cast it, and realized that although I could easily cast it with actors from twenty-five years ago, those actors were all now much too old (or too dead) to play those roles. I haven’t watched enough of that stuff recently to cast it with people who could actually play the thing next year, as evidenced by the fact that I didn’t know Gillian Anderson was hosting the thing. Gillian Anderson? But she’s too young to play Mrs. Transome.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.