Sometimes I can write a 1000 word post on a short story or even a poem, but taking a 1000 page novel and figuring out what to do with it is too big a task. This novel begins with one of the absolute best opening chapters in all of English literature. The slow, meandering walk down the street outside the chancery courts with the absolutely disgusting yellow fog creeping in as an extended metaphor for the inhuman corruption of the court systems. Then the description of the case itself “Jarndyce and Jarndyce” which is described in a false kind of reverential air to it. There’s the trope in European literature/letters of discussing the building of cathedrals as a process that took not just years, but even centuries to complete. Where generations of workers and specialists would hand off their life’s work incomplete to the next generation who might hand it off in their own term later on. Or maybe the ways in which the building of the pyramids was also a generational legacy for 1000s of workers. Here though the case itself is treated the same way, but to what end? Nothing. It’s not only not resolved legally, but the arguing of only complicates things further and it becomes a legacy to pass on. The irony of it is that it’s a probate case, so it is literally about a legacy that needs to be sorted out, but it’s also of such grotesque complication that the legacy is likely to dry in court and lawyer fees rather than in setting up a rightful heir for their life. This theme comes through multiple other times throughout the novel more in a kind of abstract way through vignettes and side stories.
The bulk of our narrative is about Esther, who comes under the care of one Jarndyce, and obviously is set up to play a pivotal role in the case, and as Dickens is wont to do, in way that neither she nor us know to close to the end.
The best character by far though is Skimpole, a wastrel of a character, who knows nothing, cares nothing, and worries nothing about time or money. He’s a cad, but you have to respect him for his obliviousness of the whole thing.
The novel is a lot, but it’s one of the richest and engaging of Dickens’s novels.