Book info

• Title Bleak House
• Author Charles Dickens
• Year 1853
• Genre Classic

As the interminable case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs; Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery; the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn; the determined sleuth Inspector Bucket; and even Jo, the destitute little crossing-sweeper. A savage, but often comic, indictment of a society that is rotten to the core, Bleak House is one of Dickens's most ambitious novels, with a range that extends from the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to the poorest of London slums.

Thoughts

This is another from the reading list that I have tried and failed to finish. I wouldn’t normally review a book that I don’t get to the end of, but as I have to note these for the reading challenge, I may as well make a few observations.

Perhaps I was being a bit dense about the whole thing, but I just couldn’t follow it. It seemed like every single chapter was there merely as a means of introducing another new character, sometimes several. I got more and more confused trying to fit in where everyone was and what they were doing.

Aside from the characters, there seemed to be too much emphasis on the Jarndyce v Jarndyce case and very little else. In the space of the first few chapters, we had been introduced to heaps of characters, but all that had actually happened was a woman had fainted. A few more chapters later, and we had a couple of paragraphs with a refused marriage proposal that came out of nowhere and wasn’t mentioned again (for as far as I read). I couldn’t figure out what were important events and what weren’t, and the pacing didn’t work at all.

It worries me that this is supposedly regarded as one of Dickens’s finest works, and I didn’t get on with it at all, but this one just wasn’t for me.

Rating: 1 / 5