Sunday, July 08, 2007 Covington: Dickens, Doyle and oh dear! By Gary Covington Looking In
I'VE just finished reading a book which has been languishing on my shelves for years. Literally years, a couple of decades at least. A book ordered and received sight unseen from a catalogue, riffled through with growing apprehension -- heavvvyyy -- and then tucked away in a far corner to be read another day.
The tome in question (for tome it is ) is a biography of the missionary explorer David Livingstone which, I read elsewhere and years later, is considered the biography of all the biographies of Dr. L. Massively thick, five hundred pages of small print, paragraphs a chapter long and precious few places to draw breath.
Many of my books -- thanks to a wandering life -- were bought unlooked-at from lists and catalogues and some, like Livingstone, proved to be, well, not a mistake but perhaps better left unordered. Like Dickens.
This was me feeling inferior -- I'd noticed that fellow readers around me were flaunting their knowledge of the greats -- Goldsmith, Dickens, Shakespeare -- by word perfectly reeling off yards of text, writers of whom I'd read virtually nothing. I felt like the girl who's using the wrong shampoo -- sideways glances, tosses of the head, stage whispers -- he's not even read Hardy! -- and so I vowed to change my ways.
I sent off for a handful of Dickens; unabridged (mistake #2), uniform volumes, a handsome addition to my library the blurb promised, and, in due course, via a cursing postman, they arrived.
Dickens, I reckon, set off on the wrong foot or maybe I was born a century and a bit too late. The Pickwick Papers, Dickens' first venture into print, might have been digestible as weekly magazine installments but in one volume it's the size of a brick; hundreds of pages of hard going, particularly when Dickens abandons the plot (what plot there is) and devotes great wads to the ramblings of some passing minor character. Literally passing; one foot in the grave passing, not making any sense at all passing, and yet every word is faithfully set down.
I put the Pickwick Papers aside a third the way through and looked at the other Dickens handsomely gracing my bookshelf. Bleak House? Another brick. Nicholas Nickleby? Two bricks bound together. How about Hard Times? This was more like it, a digestible thickness, and yet it still took me three reads to get it down. How foreign students manage Dickens- whose tales are for the most part set in lower class Victorian England with its singular slang and rituals -- is a mystery.
Leaning against Dickens are a handful of Sherlock Holmes novels. Aren't you amazed? How could I, an admitted Holmesaholic, leave stories of the great consulting detective unread.
No problem. At one time I'd order or buy any volume with Holmes, Watson, even Moriarty in the title. It was no easy task, the output of Holmesian writings having progressed from respectful imitation to an industry. Some I read and placed back on the shelf for another read later on. More I laid down after only a chapter or two -- I was discovering what Conan Doyle knew; that the Holmes/Watson device only works for a short story. That a novel length Holmes adventure cannot dash away at the same pace as a short which is, as it were, stripped for action; the novel requiring padding in the form of subplots, crowds of bit-part characters and diversions galore which, in the end, make for a confusing and tiresome read.
Of the 60 Holmes/Watson tales Conan Doyle wrote only four are of novel length. The more convincing Doyle successors all write short stories or collections of shorts. There are honourable exceptions but even these are slim tales of 200 pages or less; not the 400 page monsters sitting on my top shelf.
I'll get tired of looking at them eventually. Trot them down to Davao's public library and thus make room for future goodies and goodies there are sure to be. I've just heard, for example, that the fellow who wrote the mammoth Livingstone biography has written, 30 years on, a companion volume on Henry Moreton Stanley. Hmmm?
