Dickensian

Christmas half-hour gobbets of Dickens seemed to work well on BBC1 with 'Little Dorrit' in 2008, so they've come up with this series of 20 half-hour episodes, airing a bit like a soap over the holidays.  This is another of those reboots/reinventions such as all those spin-offs of Austen novels, featuring characters from various Dickens stories in a murder-mystery.  None other than Inspector Bucket investigates the murder of one Jacob Marley, partner of Ebenezer Scrooge.

It's all rather fun if you like the Dickensian vibe without being too familiar with the original novels.  If you are a die-hard fan you will probably be too busy allocating characters to novels, or being appalled at the licence taken with, for example, the relative chronology.  Young Miss Havisham (Tuppence Middleton) is here dressed much as Estella would dress in 'Great Expectations' some years later.  And then there's Marley, who here deviates from miserliness just long enough to engage the services of young Nancy, through her pimp Fagin, much to Sykes's chagrin.  Meanwhile Amelia Havisham's friend Honoria Barbary is about to disgrace herself with a soldier under the disapproving eye of her spartan sister Frances....

Hopefully it can sustain 20 episodes, because if not it will just look like a lazy purloining of pre-written characters and their stories.  It never ceases to amaze us how what is essentially 'fan fic' can suddenly become respectable if commissioned.  We hear the new series of 'Endeavour' features riffs on famous tales such as 'The Great Gatsby'.  There are masterful reinterpretations, but they are rare, and 'Morse' ran out of good ideas when they'd exhausted Colin Dexter's novels.  So there. 

Drood – the Denouement

It may be limp to say it just didn’t feel right, but then, the arts are not science and there are no objective, empirical measures, so... it just didn’t feel right.  All credit to Gwyneth Hughes for even trying to conclude a Dickensian tome when he’s arguably even more popular now than in his lifetime, and not known for his simplistic plots.   The resolution she proposed, however, seemed a mish-mash of modern psychology (Jasper’s bad because Daddy didn’t love him) and enough coincidences to out-Dickens Dickens (not only are Drood and Jasper brothers, rather than nephew and uncle, but the Landless twins are also the product of Drood Senior’s lust).  We were tempted to ask whether Ms Hughes had helped out with the recent spoof with Stephen Fry et al.

The contrivance of Edwin’s having gone to Egypt without telling anyone, therefore leaving everyone to believe him dead, and turning up again just in time to tie up all the loose ends, was less than convincing, to say the least.  They may not have had email, but they did have post and even, for some of the distance, telegraph.  His reputation had enjoyed something of a renaissance by then – strange how often this is the case with the dead – yet despite his growing maturity he hadn’t seen fit to bother informing anyone for the supposed year he was away?

Perhaps the main problem with finishing the creative vision of someone else, particularly when the original work is from a different era, is that it can’t be picked up from where the author left off.  The externals that shaped Dickens’s thoughts are so far gone that the modern writer must rely as much on Dickens’s other novels as on history books.  Had he lived, he would undoubtedly not only have finished writing but revised earlier parts of the book, perhaps making major changes, and what he left us with is by default inferior to what would have been published, had it reached that stage.  There is a continuing fad for ‘additionals’, be they sequels, prequels or reimaginings, and some have more success than others but, we would argue, one of the reasons for the popularity of Dickens in this cynical, business-driven age, is his ability to take his world and from it create something new.

Edwin Drood

 

Dickens’s famously unfinished last novel gets the BBC treatment.  For those seeking comfort, his stocks-in-trade are mostly to be found: aptly-named characters, Cockney urchins and grubby old drunks, and coincidental love-interests.  Where ‘Drood’ differs from the rest is in its lack of a sympathetic central character.  The main trio of Edwin (Freddie Fox), Rosa (Tamzin Merchant) and Edwin’s Uncle John Jasper (Matthew Rhys) are all in need of a good shake, though at least Rosa comes to her senses towards the end of the first episode of two.

This made the unfolding drama less gripping than it might have been, and we can’t help but speculate as to whether Dickens would have revised and re-written swathes of it, as he often did after first serialisation.  Or maybe, in his declining years, he decided to shade his characters a little differently.  There is a lovely atmosphere of darkness, perfect for a winter evening, and as usual it all looks sumptuous but we’re not sure about the casting.  Fox is boy-band pretty with a voice to match, and does it really add anything to have the Landless twins as mixed race?  We’re not talking about colour-blind casting – their ‘foreign’ nature is a key narrative feature – but Dickens wasn’t explicit about whether they were Colonial British and seen as inferior for that reason, which was a very real prejudice of his times.  OK, it’s quibbling, and the hour rollicked along with everything pointing towards the perfect solution of Neville Landless (Sacha Dhawan) marrying Rosa, his sister Helena (Amber Rose Revah) marrying Rev. Crisparkle (Rory Kinnear), Edwin growing up a bit and Jasper suffering eternally for his impure thoughts.  Castration might be a safer solution for Rosa, but we doubt Dickens would ever have made that particular revision....

Being a 19^th Century novel, however, ‘downhill’ doesn’t mean an easy ride, and we were left with a scene of Jasper apparently carrying out his laudanum-induced desires of murdering Edwin, believing him to be a rival for Rosa.  So, is Edwin really dead at Jasper’s hands?  Will Neville be blamed?  Has it left Rosa vulnerable to the unwelcome attentions of her music master?  Dickens wrote more, with his usual large cast of characters, and even hinted at an ending, but it’s been left to screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes to script her own conclusion.  It may be hard to please Dickens purists, but at least anything she comes up with won’t be any more outlandish than anything written by the great man himself.