Returned to Life

I was not expecting to be so blown away by A Tale of Two Cities. I haven't even really begun a new book yet and it's been over 48 hours since I finished it. Usually I close the book I've finished and immediately pick up the next book and begin reading. It is the very unusual book that makes it impossible for me to do this. I'll also say that A Tale of Two Cities has leapt into my top five favorite books of all time, displacing Possession by A. S. Byatt. 

I wonder if my reaction to it is because I went into it cold. Not really knowing anything about it other than it was set during the time of the French Revolution was one of my reasons for picking it up. I did scan the introduction a little bit and it gave me the clue that there was a substitution of victims, so I was aware of that part, but I did stop reading the introduction because they are dreadful about spoilers and I didn't want to know any more. 

That said, I'm going to pause here for a moment. If you have not read it, are intrigued, and think you might want to give it a try, stop reading here. There will be spoilers in the rest of what I'm going to say. You can always come back here and read the rest after you've read it.

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I've been thinking about this book for a couple of days now, and I'm still not quite sure what I want to say. This is mainly because I have so much to say that the words and thoughts and ideas get into a log jam in my brain and nothing can come out. I think what struck me the most is what an amazing picture Dickens paints of what the lack of empathy looks like. I came across a statement recently that said 'evil is the lack of empathy'. This is certainly true in this book. 

The picture Dickens paints of the French elite was horrifying. It is an absolute disregard for the peasantry. One particularly gut wrenching scene is when a nobleman is racing his carriage through a village and runs over a small child. The nobleman is only bothered by this because it detains him a bit. Marie Antoinette's declaration of, "Let them eat cake," is only a very small example of the atrocities the French peasantry experienced. It's no wonder they rose up against their persecutors. But Dickens then goes to show how far the peasantry went the other way. Once again, a lack of empathy became evil. None of it is pleasant or easy.

In the midst of this you have the main characters acting as the possibility of what could have been when kindness and empathy are present. There is a French nobleman who refuses his title because he hates what it stands for. A doctor who was imprisoned for 18 years because he spoke out against a nobleman. There is forgiveness and kindness and a generosity of spirit. 

This is also a story of resurrection. The phrase "returned to life" is repeated and characters who were thought lost are freed. And there is the moment when one man takes the place of another at the guillotine out of love. Forgiveness, resurrection, and love are woven all the way through the book even in the midst of atrocities. 

There are two other characters I want to mention. The first is Mrs. Defarge who knits and knits and knits and never sees everything. Or at least never seems to see anything. She was one character I had heard of... Mrs. Defarge who knits. That was what she had been reduced to. Yet I found her to be one of the most terrifying, evil, and tragic characters in the entire book. Give a woman a pair of knitting needles and she will be one non-existent even with a revolver tucked in her shirt and a bloody knife held in her belt. 

The second is La Guillotine. Yes, the instrument of execution is truly one of the characters. She is the rebellion's monstrous creation taking vengeance on those who abused the peasantry and then taking vengeance out of a sheer love of bloodshed. La Guillotine was insatiable and the crowds who watched became the same. 

The book was written only about sixty years after the Terror. It was recent past, not any different than someone today writing about the 1970's. Near the end of the book, Dickens includes a warning.

" Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind." (Book the Third, chapter 15)