Book Review: Dickens Study Guide by Lee Fisher Gray

A critic once made the following remark about Charles Dickens's parents: 'His father was Mr Micawber; his mother was Mrs Nickleby'. I consider it a nice tribute to one of the world's greatest creator of characters. Indeed, Dickens's early experiences were similar to some of those depicted in David Copperfield. It is his training as a reporter and a sketch-writer that prepared him for to subsequently launch a creative endeavour that can only be compared with that of Shakespeare in the scope and density of his imagined world. David Masson described Dickens's work as 'humanity caught…and kept permanent in its extremest mood'. It is difficult to keep track of this abundance of humanity that thrives in the world of Charles Dickens. Lee Fisher Gray's Dickens Study Guide brings between its covers short descriptions of the 212 characters from Dickens's 15 novels. The book is designed to be of worth to 'English literature students, researchers, quizmasters and others who aim to find answers quickly'.

 Dickens Study Guide opens with a Key that will give the reader information on the number of characters in each of Dickens's fifteen novels and 'three selected short works'. Then there is the Dickens Register which is an alphabetical list of the characters on the left column and a reference to the work in which they appear on the right. What follows is a description of the characters 'in Dickens's own words' arranged alphabetically under chapter headings bearing the names of the novels. The novels are arranged alphabetically too. The roman numerals after each entry indicate the chapter in which the character first appears. Here's an example of the description of a minor character taken from the book:

 DRUMMLE, BENTLEY (XXV), a rich and heavily built youth, a “contemptible, clumsy, sulky, booby” marries Estella. The marriage is unhappy; he is killed after mistreating a horse. 

Dickens Study Guide also incorporates an All-Dickens Quiz of fifty questions and answers on the characters in Dickens's novels which may be useful for quizmasters and quiz participants and crossword enthusiasts. 

Lee Fisher Gray has done the hard work. He has gleaned for us within the compact structure of a book, details about a multitude of characters from the novels of Charles Dickens. His register is concise and in his own words 'free from clutter'. It will be a handy guide of information and an useful book to keep on your shelf. It is a good aid to memory as far as Dickens's novels are concerned. It can be of help in sustaining the popularity of Charles Dickens's novels in today's busy world. This is an ideal reference for school students working on a study project on Dickens or the casual reader who may want to look up quickly why Caddy Jellyby always looked unhappy. 

However, there is very little in Dickens Study Guide for either the serious student of English literature or a researcher who is supposed to go through the novels attentively. It can only serve as a ready reference and nothing more. No attempt has been made here to evaluate the characters or add critical commentaries. This reviewer remembers a similar compendium on the poetry of Robert Browning called Browning Cyclopedia by Edward Berdoe, a book no longer in print. But Berdoe's book did not merely provide facts and items of information. It also contained detailed explanations of obscure allusions that abound in Browning's poems. Lee Fisher Gray's Dickens Study Guide does not attain that stature. 

 [Gray, Lee Fisher; Dickens Study Guide: Who the characters are and what they did; Matador; Troubador Publishing Ltd; UK]

© Subhamay Ray

A Book written in Stone, a Cathedral made of Paper

 On Monday, April 15, 2019 a devastating fire raged through the Notre Dame cathedral of Paris, causing its central spire to collapse. The full magnitude of the colossal damage is not yet known but the French President, Emmanuel Macron, vowed that the Paris landmark would be rebuilt. A 19th century work of fiction made the French to rediscover the cathedral of Notre Dame. Can that book produce the same miracle again? 

Let us seek an answer by revisiting Victor Hugo’s monumental novel Notre Dame de Paris, known in English by the widely used title The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It is this work of fiction that brought renewed attention of the French nation to this Gothic edifice in the 19th century and made it a symbol of national unity.  In that novel, the cathedral of Notre Dame is not just a cold and lifeless location. For Hugo the damages suffered by the monument are as much from the wounds inflicted on it through the ages as they are from attempts at restorations that damaged more than they saved, adding inert plaster to an organism even though it is made of stone. 

Ironically, it is on April 15, 1829 that Victor Hugo, all of 27 years and not yet bearded, gave to his publisher Gosselin the manuscript of his novel Notre-Dame de Paris. The book is finally published in 1831 and its success established it as a major work of French fiction. So great was its success and such was its association with the cathedral that a famous caricature of Benjamin Roubaud represented a gigantic Hugo, leaning against the cathedral and Auguste Vacquerie, friend of the poet and novelist, wrote about him noting that “the towers of Notre-Dame resemble the H of his name”.

The story of Victor Hugo’s novel is well- known: in the Paris of 1482, the hunchback Quasimodo, bellringer of Notre Dame, loves the beautiful Esmeralda, gypsy dancer who is also courted by Captain Phœbus de Châteaupers and coveted by the sinister archdeacon Claude Frollo, adoptive father of the hunchback. Quasimodo's is an unrequited love. When Esmeralda rejects the archdeacon’s lecherous approaches, Frollo hatches a plot to destroy her that only Quasimodo can prevent. Victor Hugo’s sensational, evocative novel brings life to the medieval Paris he loved, and mourns its passing in one of the greatest historical romances of the nineteenth century. 

In Notre Dame de Paris, the cathedral is the central place: Frollo and Quasimodo live there, the crowd presses on to its forecourt, Esmeralda finds refuge there. It is difficult today to read the novel and miss the gloomy prophecy of a blazing fire when Quasimodo pours on the vagabonds who assail him, streams of molten lead: "All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery, higher than the central rose window, there was a great flame rising between the two towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a vast, disordered, and furious flame, a tongue of which was borne into the smoke by the wind, from time to time.”

It is sometimes said that the cathedral is the main character of Victor Hugo’s novel. In fact, Notre Dame is not a cold and lifeless setting. Metaphors continually humanize it. The stone becomes flesh and the damages suffered by the monument are as many wounds: “The church of Notre-Dame de Paris is still no doubt, a majestic and sublime edifice. But, beautiful as it has been preserved in growing old, it is difficult not to sigh, not to wax indignant, before the numberless degradations and mutilations which time and men have both caused the venerable monument to suffer……. three sorts of ravages to-day disfigure Gothic architecture. Wrinkles and warts on the epidermis; this is the work of time. Deeds of violence, brutalities, contusions, fractures; this is the work of the revolutions from Luther to Mirabeau. Mutilations, amputations, dislocation of the joints, “restorations”; this is the Greek, Roman, and barbarian work of professors according to Vitruvius and Vignole…...”

Not that Victor Hugo is opposed to the idea of ​​restoring a monument. But these ‘restorations’ sometimes damage more than they save. This conception, as Delphine Gleizes and Chantal Brière have shown, animates Hugo, a great advocate of heritage, when he sits between 1835 and 1848 at the Committee for Arts and Monuments. To save a monument is not to replant it, but to respect its principles, its spirit and soul. Notre Dame had one, and his name is Quasimodo. Hugo never stops insisting on this fact. The bell-ringer, like the cathedral he haunts, combines in him the monstrosity with the sublime. But another man lives in Notre-Dame. If the hunchback represents a vital principle, Frollo embodies petrified authority, deadly frustration and sexual predation. 

In Notre-Dame de Paris Victor Hugo tells us about  people from all sorts of social backgrounds, students, the bourgeoisie, marginalised people like Esmeralda or Quasimodo, the outcasts and the vagabonds. It is as if he informs his readers that he is going to immerse them in an inclusive national community. This is a work of fiction in which all the characters are significant, including the anonymous extras. Hugo opts for a new narrative mode and a new perception of the social world in the lines of Walter Scott.

Yet, in spite of this expansive communal element, what is remarkable in this novel is that the eponymous heroine is the cathedral. She's alive with all her splendours in spite of the fact that she is despised and defaced. Spitting is vandalism and then there are the bad renovators. The latter are those who imparts to Notre-Dame, which is a marvel of Gothic architecture, later additions and alterations. Renovation is a subtle and difficult art for great monuments have evolved over many centuries. The novelist explains the process memorably and eloquently: “Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending, pendent opera interrupta; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art. The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction,— following a natural and tranquil law. …. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.”

The cathedral is thus a changing, evolving entity and it is this evolution that makes it so strong and yet so fragile and perishable. Whatever external changes are made, the basic structure and the basic principles of the form architecture are never altered. Again in Victor Hugo’s inimitable words: “All these shades, all these differences, do not affect the surfaces of edifices only. It is art which has changed its skin. The very constitution of the Christian church is not attacked by it. There is always the same internal woodwork, the same logical arrangement of parts…..The trunk of a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.” 

In the chapter ‘This will kill that’, Hugo proclaims the victory of the written word, distributed by the printing press, over a monument: "The stone book, so solid and so durable, would make room for the paper book, more solid and more durable still.” Hugo could not foresee that the cathedral would burn, but he could not dismiss it either. A flood can always engulf a mountain, he recalls. We now know that fire can consume Notre Dame. But if the cathedral is a stone book, the book is a paper cathedral. And history gives reason to Hugo: the church burns, the book remains, and we pick it up in bookstores. In these distressing times, a consolation remains: the façade and the towers have held firm. The H of Hugo is still erect. The great French novelist prophesied that ‘the book will kill the edifice’. Yet, as we receive news of a sudden spurt in the sale of the novel, we realise that the book has helped in restoring the edifice to the mind of man. 

All the excerpts are taken from the English translation of the novel entitled The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Tr. Isabel F. Hapgood)

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© Subhamay Ray

Book Review: Poor Economics by Abhijit V Banerjee and Esther Duflo

 Poor Economics is about the economics of poverty. It embodies a coherent overview of the observations and deductions derived from numerous randomized control trials conducted in developing countries on a fairly large population living below the poverty line. The central focus of the endeavour is a deeper comprehension of the reasons that perpetuate widespread poverty in many countries of the world and find a way forward that may ultimately reduce or eradicate global poverty. 

The book examines a wide variety of issues related to the lives of the world’s poor: food, health, education, employment, savings and insurance, microfinance etc. and asks questions as to the ways and means of improving the conditions of the poor with respect to each of those issues. It also studies the role policies, governments and institutions play in eradicating, or at times, prolonging poverty. It raises questions that are germane such as if the poor are provided with more money, will it lead to better nutrition in the short term or do those with low incomes largely spend money on expensive cures rather than cheap prevention. The authors delve into the psychological reasons that make the needy and the indigent ignore the future for the present or how they lack motivation because all that they dream of appear impossibly far away into the future. 

Yet, there are issues and areas where the arguments of the writers do not appear very convincing. They propose ways of upscaling small businesses without taking into account if there is more demand of goods and services that such businesses offer in where they operate. If entrepreneurship is not the way forward and only ‘good jobs’ can help a large number of people cross the poverty line, who will provide ‘good jobs’ in such large numbers? Once at least in this book, the writers make a truly preposterous statement:

‘As a result the agents of the government (the bureaucrats, the pollution inspectors, the policemen, the doctors) cannot be paid directly for the value they are delivering to the rest of us -- when a policeman gives us a ticket, we complain, but we don’t offer him a reward for doing his job well and keeping the roads safe for everyone. Contrast this with the grocery store owner: She delivers by selling us eggs, and when we pay her for the eggs, we know we are paying for the social value she is delivering.’

Offer the policeman a reward? Are bureaucrats and members of the police are not already suitably compensated for the services they render? Then again, at least in the Indian context, what explains the ‘lazy thinking at the stage of policy design’ which leads to ‘large-scale waste and policy failure’ when the policy-makers are the bureaucrats who have served several years at the grassroots or the political executives, a majority of whom are supposed to have a rural background? 

The authors of Poor Economics seem to rely on incremental change for ‘breaking the cycle of poverty’. The question remains if it is a solution, does it not suffer from the same ‘time inconsistency’ that is mentioned several times in the book? Would it not be demotivating for both the affected and the solution-providers if it remains a long struggle and no light can yet be seen at the end of the tunnel?

© Subhamay Ray

Book Review: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

 What is there in the landscape of the land that could justify the use of that ‘lofty adjective’ in the name of Great Britain? That is a question the first person narrator, who is the protagonist of the novel and a butler by profession, asks in the book. ‘It is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle….its sense of restraint’ in the landscape of the land that makes it great. Can that ‘sense of restraint’, that ‘lack of obvious drama’ be the focal point of man’s professional life, nay, his entire life? Ishiguro’s fictional narrative seems to suggest so. 

The word ‘butler’ which is defined as the ‘chief manservant of a house’ is derived from Old French bouteillier (a derivation from bouteille or bottle) that denotes a ‘cup-bearer’.  How dignified such a profession can be unless the practitioners themselves train their minds to believe that their professional greatness lies in ‘their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost’?

The undercurrent that runs with the narrative is one of professional restraint which involves hiding one’s emotions even at the face of personal disaster. The effect of that restraint on the life of the protagonist is described poignantly in the last few pages of the novel. It should not fill the readers with a sense of remorse but with a profound sadness that needs to be savoured. The bitter-sweet aftertaste with which this piece of fiction leaves its readers in the end is a vindication of the subtle craft of the writer. 

That restraint involves ignoring the travails and tribulations of the professional life of a butler -- when to emerge from the shadow of a tree to accost some important person, when to ask a question, how to judge the mood of the employer, when to put forward a proposal. Sometimes, life would appear to be an endless wait for that right moment, that very opportune moment for taking a step or carrying out an action. The pretensions that have been part of a butler’s job have been demonstrated subtly and poignantly in the novel. 

On another plane, that waiting for the right moment takes another form. Unless he is entirely alone, a butler cannot ‘unburden himself of his role’. He ‘cannot be seen casting it aside one moment simply to don it again the next as though it were nothing more than a pantomime costume’. When the incumbent is able to play that role perfectly, a ‘feeling of triumph’ wells up in him. When the idiocy of wearing such a garb for one’s entire life will ultimately dawn on Stevens, it is too late: ‘After all, there will be no turning back the clock now’. 

Thus, the butler’s story is superimposed on a love story that runs thinly and is only perceived by way of hints and insinuations. The two main characters, Mr Stevens and Miss Kenton, are not only prisoners of their jobs but also of their age and society. Historical allusions, anecdotes related to important political figures of the time, help to ground the narrative on concrete reality. Yet, at the end of it, one is bound to feel the futility of the big events, their inability to bring any change in the life of individuals. That is as true of the life of the villagers that Stevens visits as it is for his own life, although in an entirely different plane: ‘They want a quiet life….but really, no one in the village wants upheaval, even if it might benefit them’.  That is why when the evening of life comes, Stevens, who has been devoted to his profession his entire life finds himself wistfully considering ‘what might have been’ if things were different. 

A subtle demonstration that Stevens is acutely aware of what might have been is found when during his meeting with his erstwhile colleague, the reader finds Stevens referring to her as ‘Miss Kenton’ when he is thinking aloud, but as ‘Mrs Benn’ when she is being addressed. The heart-breaking admission at the end of the novel that the butler has given all he had to Lord Darlington and left nothing for himself is one uncharacteristic opening of the heart, probably for the first time in the novel. An admission that came too late. 

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day is a great read. Highly recommended. 

© Subhamay Ray