Our Mutual Friend

"If I’m asked to choose any list of books, it would have to include Charles Dickens . He was the author I first seriously came to as a teenager. Every year, I always re-read a Dickens novel. I’ve included Our Mutual Friend because it’s his last completed novel, but also because it has this wonderful, foggy scene at the start of Book III. It is as powerful as the opening pages of Bleak House —which would have been the obvious other candidate for a Dickens book on London fog. Dickens was a social campaigner, but he was also the reason why legislation did not get through. Dickens, whilst complaining about the London air quality, also supported the idea of the hearth being the central point of the family. He made us fall in love with our fire place. In fact, in this book, you have a scene in which Lizzie Hexam looks for her future in the fireplace, in the flames. He’s on both sides of the argument, and I suspect he was clever enough to realise that. In Bleak House he uses it to portray the fact that the law is obscuring truth, just as the fog is obscuring the buildings and people. In Our Mutual Friend , he looks at the way the City is being corrupted by money. We have this tour de force writing where he describes the London fog. It’s grey in the countryside and as it moves closer to the centre of the City of London it gets blacker and blacker. He’s showing how the London heart is getting blacker and blacker because it’s becoming corrupted by its love of money. The novel is about corruption caused by wealth. I think every writer who comes to write a book about London, and to use London fog, is always referring back to Dickens, whether or not they decide to ignore him, or to use the way in which he employed London fog in a different way. Both are acknowledging Dickens’s power and his influence on later writings on London."

"This book comes very late in Dickens’s own career, but it has a powerful sense – a sense that’s been crucial to me – of London depending on the river. It begins with this fantastic scene of corpse-fishing: a family that literally gets their living from the drowned. That’s a terrific metaphor for one whole aspect of London fiction, wherein London keeps itself alive by transfusions of the exotic from other countries. In this period, obviously, the idea of the colonial was very vivid – people would disappear into Australia or Canada or New Zealand or South Africa and come back reinvented or richer. This book is the great archaeological articulation of that. And a lot of the characters depart on huge walks, deranged walks where they’re chased by their demons across miles of riverbank. It’s a book that absolutely haunts me, this one. Yes, he did. He had various troubled periods of his life. He used the walks as a form of research – and as a form of de-programming himself from the long hours he spent intensely writing. He would go off for these 15-or-so-mile journeys, often at night – there are very good journalistic accounts he’s done of his nocturnal ramblings. Sometimes he’ll see some building and go into it and investigate it – he weaves it all in. He’s absorbing this material and generally letting it sit in his mind until it forms a fictional form. Often, the resulting work is serially published, almost like a modern television programme, so it has that kind of drama and excitement, but it also always has the deeper reach of his knowledge of the city. Yes, that’s true. Dickens has a slightly conversational rhythm, an extravagant rhythm. He also has the kind of long rhythm of a person who walks great distances and lets sentences pour out in a rich-tongued kind of way. It’s certainly part of his way of seeing the city. Whereas now, I guess, people would generally be shorter, sharper – and certainly the writing would tend to be very visual. Someone like JG Ballard, say, is almost like a painter. He’s so specific and precise in his physical details, and there’s no excess in the writing, there’s no rhetorical style or flourish. So it’s a pared-down, scientific, technological prose – as is suitable to the kind of buildings and areas he’s describing."