Dickens Without a Twist
KRAMER, MIMI
Dickens Without a Twist The House of Cards By Leon Garfield St. Martin's. 296 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Mimi Kramer Contributor, "The New Criterion" A crying baby in a village in Poland, swept...
...What Garfield is trying to do is no more obscure than the mechanics of his plot...
...Is there a connection between Katerina and young David...
...His plot also seeks to connect humble lodgings in that city's Polish-Jewish quarter with great country estates in Gloucestershire, the pompous with the unassuming, the good with the bad, the yearning with the contented, the present with the past-and it does...
...I keep it like that as it was his move...
...Connections in Dickens-such as the role of Oliver Twist's grandfather or the truth about Estella's birth-are minor niceties in a world where coincidence is the exception to the rule, a world whose vastness and antagonism Dickens has taken pains to invent...
...While unfolding the fortunes of the imperious Perdita and her shabby but respectable father, he takes us into some of Dickens' favorite haunts: law courts, mid 19th-century London's dockyards, prisons, and places of execution...
...He makes no attempt to delve further into the psychology of the child left behind in Poland than to posit that he will one day become a psychopath in London...
...Garfield is at his best when he is not trying to fascinate us...
...In the disembodied feet that clump through the first chapter of The Old Curiosity Shop, or in the engulfing London fog that pervades the opening pages of Bleak House, Dickens produces a dangerous landscape of indifference, the inanimate counterpart to the hypocrisy of society...
...Garfield's "Victorian novel" is not meretricious...
...Does that not remind you of something...
...Imagine the effect Jaggers would have on us if Wemmick were forever poking his head through the connecting door: "It's only 'is way, Pip sir, it's only 'is way...
...About to begin jury duty on the important case of Standfast v. Standfast, he looks forward to making his little mark in the service of justice...
...Taking refuge in the feeble device of madness, he sends Walker out to wander the streets of London, fully kitted up in semi-deranged state and tramp costume, while David Kozlowski goes to the gallows scarcely lamented and only superficially understood...
...His excursion into the realm of the influential-indifferent in Chancery Lane is tempered by too active, too heavy a voice of irony...
...In the meantime, his service to mankind takes the form of the Friday night dinner parties where friends and strangers, Jew and Gentile alike, are brought together to bask in the modest glow of the family's Sabbath candles...
...On the whole, it is a good beginning: As the incongruous pair disappears from view we wonder what will happen to the baby, apparently the sole survivor...
...Soon, moreover, a pattern of quickly satisfying our just heightened curiosity transforms The House of Cards from a potentially engrossing drama of loss and redemption-what the author perhaps meant to write-into an irritating exercise in literary mimicry...
...When Mr...
...Perhaps he should have taken more trouble to develop the complexities of the precarious relationship between Perdita and her father (established heavy-handedly in a scene where father and daughter build a house of cards...
...promise that everything will work itself out according to some equitable and perceptive plan...
...Unfortunately, Garfield does nothing with it...
...Walker will prove not to be both the real Sir Robert Standfast and the "broken-down" tramp of Perdita's nightmares...
...not many major perplexities are left as far as the plot is concerned...
...Dolly, purveyor of Famous Pickled Herring, "an excellent kindly man whose chief unhappiness was the un-happiness of others and whose chief pleasure was in helping people...
...Garfield, lacking courage, turns,Mr...
...a scavenging tramp, wryly addressing corpses in a grotesque parody of conversation as he picks his way through the belongings of the dead...
...We abruptly stop wondering when we are immediately transported to the "rushing multitude" of London some dozen years later and encounter the nondescript Mr...
...In the middle of the festivities an uninvited guest, the exotic and beautiful Katerina Kropotka, bursts in upon the party, supposedly seeking shelter from pursuers...
...His room is crammed with toys and games, diversions for the poor souls who tread the long path to the gallows by way of his cell...
...Some intriguing notions about guilt and being a good Samaritan do surface, but these fall by the wayside in the inexorable march toward the book's larger message, the teaching of the Socialist jailer: "It wasn't the Tree of Knowledge that brought us down, it was the Tree of Property...
...And when Standfast v. Standfast turns out to be a case of identity involving a hefty inheritance, our interest dwindles to a single question: Can it be that this story really isn't as simplistic as it seems, and that through some diabolical twist Mr...
...The jailer who takes custody of Kozlowski when he is arrested for Katerina' s murder calls the prisoner by his first name, frets about the boy's emotional well-being and doesn't "hold with" hangings...
...By the end of The House of Cards, so do we...
...We cannot worry about injustice when Garfield's incessant parenthetical references to the lawyer's thoughts ("Might take a bite of dinner afterward...
...It is noteworthy that Garfield has written extensively for children and "young adults," because his design and pacing here are decidedly childlike...
...Sooner than that, as it happens...
...Clarkey, the sinister man who tracks Mr...
...Suspense in Dickens depends on narrative economy and artful control of how much the reader is told...
...He wants to topple the romantic structure of the rags-to-riches fantasy: His heroine must come to terms with her peasant origins...
...Fairhazel-very much the sort of woman David Copperfielefs Agnes Wickfield might have become had she married a Jewish tailor-and David Kozlowski, an intense young man newly arrived from Poland who "would have been a child" when Walker was there 12 years ago...
...Clarkey leaves the prison he thinks, "most unfamiliar-ly, that the house the law built might be, after all, a somewhat imperfect piece of architecture...
...By page 55 a rendezvous between David and Katerina tells us as much about her as we will ever know...
...Reviewed by Mimi Kramer Contributor, "The New Criterion" A crying baby in a village in Poland, swept by the wind in the wake of massacre...
...What was he doing in rural Poland anyway...
...A long time ago...
...Yet in this instance, only to connect is not enough...
...What gruesome murder does the morbid party game they play foreshadow...
...Garfield is too soft-hearted to present us with a sustained portrait of evil (the only true villain, Katerina, is killed off halfway through), or any sense of danger...
...Although her fictitious pursuers, her hold over the young man, her command of English and her general malevolence remain an enigma, at the end of this scene ("A baby and a tramp...
...Walker so relentlessly, turns out to be an unassuming clerk with no blacker intent than that of persuading Walker to claim his inheritance...
...Even Garfield's prison officials are softies...
...Didn't you notice," Mr...
...Clarkey: "An old one...
...By contrast, Garfield introduces characters whose sole purpose is to mystify us, and relies on evoking the "bustling" domain of Dickens by allusion rather than troubling to create his own...
...Walker-the-erst-while-tramp into a missing baronet...
...Clarkey keeps piping up, "It's only 'is way, sir, it's only 'is way...
...The seed of a good idea is embedded somewhere in the moving image of an abandoned youngster, the "unseen watcher," looking on while the infant is being rescued...
...Nearly all Garfield's characters are nice guys...
...a battered violin, a lullaby, and an " unseen watcher" following tramp and infant as they set off toward the horizon...
...Garfield, however, avoids stress at all costs...
...About an unfinished chess game the jailer explains to Mr...
...He has simply set his sights too high...
...There might have been some interesting friction when Walker does come forward and the family lawyer, a vaguely Jaggers-like fellow, demands to know why the young Sir Robert disappeared in the first place and why he is reappearing now...
...The principal characters assemble in the early chapters at the home of the jovial Mr...
...In his own work he self-consciously sets out to model himself on the Master...
...With this scene Leon Garfield inaugurates his "Victorian novel" of hidden identities and long-lost relatives, of secret motivations and stories from the past...
...In privacy Perdita, under the impression that Katerina does not understand English, pours out the story she has always been told of her past-her childish terror of the horrid tramp from whom her father bought her...
...At the particular gathering we attend, in addition to the Walkers we meet the self-effacing widow Mrs...
...Dickens did this by making Estella the daughter of a convict and a murderess...
...An atmosphere of mystery descends: Who is Katerina and why is she being chased...
...There might have been genuine pathos in a confrontation between Walker and a bitter David Kozlowski, or in the portrayal of a good man's sin-be it a sin of omission, a sin in the past, one he could not have helped committing...
...Walker and his daughter, apetulant 12-year-old...
...If the unsuspecting are surprised by the identity of Pip's benefactor in Great Expectations, it is partly because the convict episode at the beginning performs so many functions: providing conflict, creating a mood, establishing character...
...Garfield, though, takes care that nothing adult will distress us: No rational account is given...
...He aims at Dickens and he misses Dickens...
...Garfield's one previous foray into adult fiction was his completion of Charles Dickens' unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, an effort that won critical acclaim both in England and America for its "authenticity...
...We shudder: Perhaps Katerina will turn out to speak English and to be no friend to the Walkers, after all...
...Dolly asks his wife, "that there were times when he seemed almost frightened of her...
...Well, everyone knows that prison reform in Dickens' time was just around the corner...
...No wonder, then, that the truth emerges in round numbers...
Vol. 66 • January 1983 • No. 2
