Jarndyce vs Jarndyce - not the Victorian equivalent of Kramer vs Kramer.

Discussion begins August 16th - I'm setting it a little later because it is a longish book. Non-spoilery comments can be posted before then, though.

Wheeeeee! What serendipity. The paperback has been lying by my bed for literally nearly a year, and has probably travelled with me to at least three foreign countries in that time, and I still haven't started it. This should give me an incentive to get going.

When my law graduates start work at our firm, I run an ice-breaker trivia quiz with them which is very, very vaguely related to law, and one of the questions is In which novel would you find the long-running case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce. I'm constantly amazed by how many of them think it's from a John Grisham book.

I haven't read it for quite a while now, so I'll be digging out my copy and re-reading.

Just bumping in case anyone needs a reminder. To my confusion, I couldn't find my original copy of this book - I'm sure I wouldn't have gotten rid of it and I studied it at college, so I must have had my own copy. Since it will doubtless turn up somewhere, I didn't want to buy an expensive edition (but in case it doesn't, thought I might as well get my own copy rather than library) yet in all the usual shops where they stock Wordsworth Classics, they had every Dickens book BUT Bleak House! Perhaps it's unpopular? Finally I got one from an Oxfam shop, so I'm now ready to start.

I just checked my Penguin Classics edition, which was only £4.99, and noticed that I actually bought it in November 2002 - so it's been sitting by my bed for closer to two years than one ...

Must crack on with it, it's just a bit bulky for reading on the tube.

I got mine from WH Smiths, who were having a sale on the paperbacks (buy one get another half price, I think), so I didn't have to pay full price.

I have to admit the size is a little daunting, but I made a good inroad into it, on the train journey down to a friend, from where I'm writing this. I intend to make another inroad into it on the way back tomorrow...

So, no one else has finished it yet either?

I will say, it's long, but I'm not finding it a slog like I kind of expected to.

I've finished it! Like Kmm56 says, it isn't as much as a slog as I expected, given the size.

I think it helped having the long journey, so I could get my teeth into it - i don't mind stopping and starting once I';ve got into the book, but it makes things difficult at the beginning.

I enjoyed it on the whole.

Hey! I thought we didn't have to be finished till August 16th! :)

I'm enjoying it so far, although I admit to finding all classics a "slog through," even the ones I enjoy more than others. I think it's *less* of a slog though because of the narrative- it's always changing, throwing new people into the mix and having people we've already met pass through. It's almost...proto-Tarantino.

Yeah, I set the date for this one back a bit to give everyone extra time. Including me ... but if you have comments you might forget, you could post in spoiler font.

Tarantino?! I look forward to you expanding on that comparison!

I finished it the other day - it took me a couple of hundred pages to get into it, but after that I couldn't put it down. I'll probably jot myself a few notes so that my points don't evaporate by the 16th.

*looks back up to first post*

Oops. Um, never mind.

So, then!

I hope people liked this book - I love it and thoroughly enjoyed reading it again. I think it's just the most delightful story, so many fabulous characters and very exciting - although you quickly know the central mystery, you don't know what's going to happen, yet everyone plays their parts just as their characters dictate.

A lot of people don't like Esther, but I do; I think she's very sweet and I admire how her awful childhood hasn't warped her. But I've often heard her called sly and coy. Compared to Dickens' other young women, she's pretty interesting, though (certainly compared to the dull-as-ditchwater Ada; I'm convinced that the reason Esther is constantly hymning her praises is because Dickens needed her as a reason that Esther could come to live at Bleak House, but didn't know what else to do with her, so just had Esther call her her darling a lot).

My favourite, or rather least favourite, character in the book is Skimpole. My hatred for him knows no bounds - nasty, selfish, ungrateful weasel! First time I read it, I was so shocked when I realised the extent of his selfishness. Brilliant bit of writing.

And poor Guppy ... and on another level, poor, poor little Jo!

Alas. Alack. Alas and alack. I left my book at work over the weekend, like the great big idiot I am. It'll be at least another few days before I finish it, depending on how busy the office is.

I don't know what to think of Esther. I wonder if it'd be easier to like her if her part of the story wasn't told in first person. It's strange, but it seems like it's harder to get a sense of who she really is because we're seeing her only from her own perspective. She doesn't seem flawed enough, or at least not as far in as I've gotten. Ada is, yes, extremely dull. Poor Rick though. Watching his downhill slide has been painful. I want to hope for the best, but...I don't foresee a happy ending for him.

My comment about Tarantino- it's basically about...ok, in Pulp Fiction you see one story, and then you see another story completely, but characters from the first story are mentioned or pass through, and this time the audience sees those characters from a completely different perspective. It's not quite the same, as in Bleak House the story is still linear- meaning, it's not as though you're seeing the same events happening again but from a different perspective. But it's like, someone will be mentioned in passing in one chapter, and in another chapter you'll encounter some seemingly unimportant person who, you'll discover by the end of the chapter is the same person you met 4 chapters ago. It's just round and round. I wonder if anyone's ever made a detailed chart about all the ways the different characters are connected.

After a slow start, I hugely enjoyed Bleak House. At about a hundred or so pages in, it felt like a bit of a slog - I didn't feel that I'd grasped what was going on at all, and every time a character appeared I'd be thinking "who is Snagsby/ Tulkinghorn/ Guppy again?", and riffling backwards to try and find out. (SNeaker, I thought about drawing a chart, too.)

The reason I've had Bleak House for so long was that it was recommended by one of my best friends, who loves Dickens. At the point at which I was starting to pick up other books instead, I had a chat with her that really changed the way that I viewed the book - that you didn't have to (indeed, couldn't) understand what as going on in the Jarndyce suit, and that I should just relax into it a bit more and let the story flow. After that, I couldn't put it down. I was reading it in queues at the Post Office, on planes (the stranger next to me trying hard to ignore my tears at Jo's tragic end), in bars.

I think that enjoyment of the book must hinge on the way you see Esther. I'm usually not keen on Dickens's women (whats-her-name in A Tale of Two Cities drove me mad) but like Pandrea I had a lot of affection for her. Yes, all her self-abasement was a little irritating, but seen in the light of her awful, affection-starved childhood, her craving to be loved is very understandable. And I thought she was making a terrible mistake accepting Mr Jarndyce, so that storyline had me very gripped, even if the resolution wasn't quite convincing.

But then anyone who could tolerate Skimpole would be, I suppose, quite capable of such self-martyrdom. Oh, I wanted to give him a slap every time he started wittering on about what "a child" he was. And only Esther saw through him!

One of my favourite characters was, oddly, Sir Leicester. (Partly because I know somebody who's very like him, and the description was uncanny). But Dickens is such a genius, in the course of one paragraph after Sir Leicester's stroke he turned someone who was basically a stuffy, pompous buffoon into a tragic and noble figure.

I loved the little character sketches (like the dissolute cousin) and the pleasure Dickens seems to take in his descriptions. My absolute favourite line in the whole book was the one about rabbits' ears blowing about on a blustery day (which I now can't find) - both playful and apt.

Oh yes, Rick's fate is awful, you see it swallowing him up. I think the passage of time in the book is very good, without being heavy-handed about it.

I love that we never understand what the suit is about. I think 90% of writers would have begun with a chapter telling us about how two brothers fell out or something and when the will was read etc etc. Dickens just skips all that and never explains, which is neat.

Is the dissolute cousin the one who speaks in broken sentences? "Zample - far better hang wrong fler than no fler"? He's ace. I also like George the shooting gallery soldier and Mr Bagnet who worships his wife but "discipline must be maintained". And the little ongoing mentions of Little Swills, the comic vocalist - and Caddy and Charley and Allen and oh, I like them all.

I don't think it would quite work as a film (there was a TV adaptation in 1985 but I haven't seen it) but I think that Lindsey Duncan would be a perfect Lady Dedlock. And I can totally see Guppy and Tony as two lowlife Tarantino characters, plotting away - Steve Buscemi and Tim Roth types.

My favourite line in the book:
"... there was a portrait of her son in it, which ... was more like than life; it insisted upon him with such obstinacy and was so determined not to let him off." Hee!

I meant to ask if anyone else's edition had the great pen-and-ink illustrations? I thought these were just excellent and really captured how the characters would look.

I had the original illustrations in my edition, too. They certainly added to the atmosphere.

I've been thinking about Mr Jarndyce and wondering how realistic you all thought his actions were. Does he just enjoy helping people, or is he a martyr to the point of self-negation? And if he does enjoy helping, why this terrible horror of being thanked (which would surely detract from the pleasure he felt)? He seemed somewhat two-dimensional and cartoony to me, which is strange when Dickens could absolutely convince me of the verisimilitude of other characters in two lines.

On a tangent, Pulp Fiction was on the telly the other night and I was surprised at how much more linear it was than I remembered.

Hmm. I don't know. He isn't quite as realistic as some of the other characters, true. I was thinking about a parallel between his and Esther's abortive engagement and that of Emily and Dean Priest in LM Montgomery's Emily Climbs (and I think there might also be something similar in the Pollyanna books) - girl becomes engaged, through gratitude to older mentor figure but in the end he steps aside in favour of the younger guy she really likes (but Jarndyce isn't as creepy as Priest). It seems a particularly Victorian theme, somehow. You don't really get a sense of Jarndyce being attracted to Esther, do you? It's presented more as if he just offers to be nice and because it's convenient, yet supposedly he's meant to be sacrificing something he dearly wants.

Perhaps he's motivated by his overwhelming desire to help people again? Since Esther is scarred from smallpox, he assumes no-one else will marry her and offers to do so himself, to save her from (horrors) spinsterhood. But then once it's clear Alan still loves her, he happily steps aside.

You're right, it is peculiarly Victorian. Perhaps since we now think of marriage as a relationship of equals based on attraction and love, we forget that in those days it was more a case of providing stability for individuals, freedom to reproduce and a helpmeet for the working man ...

Inspired by my enjoyment of Bleak House, I embarked on David Copperfield, which if anything I liked even more. In Mr Peggotty, it too has a character who can’t bear to be thanked. It also paints an awful picture of Dickens’s childhood, I had no idea that he’s had such a deprived upbringing.

And doesn't Copperfield have the best description of being drunk ever?

Oh you're right, that entire chapter ("My first dissipation") is just amazing. I practically read the whole thing aloud to Mr M.

I often quote "only my hair was drunk" when regaling people with stories from the night before ...

Ha! I did it! Only... a couple of months late.

That's all I wanted to say. Oh, wait, no, I also wanted to mention that I figured out about 150 pages in whose writing style Dickens reminded me of, and it was Tolkien. Wow, did it feel familiar once I figured that out.

Really? It's funny because, after making my way through the whole LoTR series in a one-week period, I was like "Hey, long books, no problem." But the thing about Tolkien is that he's so overwritten, I was able to...I wouldn't call it skimming, but I certainly did not concentrate so hard on the 20 or so pages in a row describing like, a tree or something. (Not to mention skipping all the damn songs.) Whereas with Dickens there'd be so many hilarious, sarcastic, or just really clever remarks within the narration that there was no question of reading the whole book very closely, so it took me much longer.

Oh god, I have to skip all the songs too. 'Course, I'm not really a Tolkien fan at all.

I'm glad you finished (and hopefully enjoyed) it, kmm!

I went to visit Brodsworth Hall today, courtesy of Uni - during the tour we told that the particular will relating to the house was alledgedly part of the nspiration for the Jarndyce v Jardynce storyline - it was an internationally notorious will apparently.

I was amused by that, and glad that I'd read the book, so I had an idea of what he was talking about.

Oh, interesting. Did it ever get settled?

In this case, yes.

The terms of the will were that most of the inheritance was to be kept in trust for 3 generations.
Needless to say, the first generation were not very happy. They disputed for ages over it, and the costs incurred meant that by the time the 4th gerneration actually inherited, it wasn't worth much more than the intial amount put in trust.

There was one they told us about (the father of one of the two to inherit) who reminded me very much of Rick - he ran up huge gambling debts, knowing that when he died, his son would inherit the trust and have to pay it off...

Bleak House is to be filmed in a soap opera style by the BBC and will run after EastEnders! Gosh! I can't wait to see this. Andrew Davies, yet again; I believe it is now illegal to adapt a classic novel without hiring him. Denis Lawson is now old enough to play aged, avuncular Jarndyce? That makes me feel old. Gillian Anderson is a very interesting choice for Lady Dedlock.

It does sound interesting! I'm all anticipation.

Oh, brilliant! I love the sound of this.

And Gillian Anderson too! I adore her. I saw her in The Sweetest Swing in Baseball last year at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square and she was just superb.

She was also excellent in House of Mirth. So she has some costume drama experience though of a very different type to Bleak House.

Yeah, she would never have occurred to me as a choice but I actually think she might work out well. I would have gone for Lindsay Duncan, but I think GA could bring out the pathos of Lady D slightly more.

The other castings are interesting too. I haven't seen Alister MacGowan do straight acting before but he can certainly do characters. Johnny Vegas is a little young but I can see him as Krook. I wonder who they will get for Guppy, Tony and the other young wastrels. Can they get Lee Ingleby in there somehow? And I'm gearing up to hate on Mr Skimpole once more, who will be able to capture his hideousness?