It was a snow day yesterday as several fresh inches fell all day keeping us under blankets and sipping tea, brought by Number One. After lunch, we watched Oliver!, the musical. At dinner time, Number Five and I discussed what the musical had kept intact in Dickens' most famous characters, and what the film had corrupted. It was easy: Nancy, albeit plot changes, remained a woman capable of great love and finding redemption, Sikes was still Sikes and the Dodger still the Dodger. But despicable Fagin, in the film, became almost an amiable fellow, dancing and making the audience smile until the last scene.This morning the extra two inches that fell overnight reflect that sun shining at last, and I have new and also bright appreciation for Dickens: we all read Dickens, during middle school, or High School, later in life, and are familiar with his imaginative stories, full of twists, turns and coincidences, his semi autobiographical characters. We like to complain about him, his lengthy descriptions, his obvious serialized style, his endless characters, his exaggerations. And yet, Dickens remains as a great author. Why?
This morning, I know why. In the inexorable and universal search for God, or Love, in the human spirit, there is a yearning satisfied when Love is found, even if in a character of a great book. So in Oliver Twist, how can the reader's heart be unmoved when Nancy risks her life to help a little orphan? When Oliver's innocence and goodness remains spotless against so much evil surrounding him? And Fagin, whose heart, despite what the musical made him to be, remains closed, evil, despairing: what about him? He too, because of Oliver and Mr. Barlow's insistence, finds a glimmer of salvation in the last page. Masterful Dickens!
Great books are made of characters encountering, and being redeemed by, Love.
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