This delightful yarn, centered around the publication of Dickens' last,
unfinished novel, puts you in the mood to read 19th century authors
-- Dickens, Thackeray, De Quincey, even William Goodwin. If you read
Pearl's "The Dante Club" already, this is a return time-travel excursion
to Boston just after the Civil War, with a side trip to Dickens' England.
Since we tend to read literature book-by-book or author-by-author and history
country-by-country and separate from literature, it's a delightful surprise
to get a sense of contemporaneity -- to encounter this historical personage
and that and realize that they were linked in the real world. And
as the mystery unfolds, you have the joy of speculating what is based on
fact and what is the author's invention. And like a nineteenth-century
author, Pearl unravels it all at the and -- sorting out how much of this
concoction of improbable events and outlandish characters derives from
meticulous research.
A meta-novel like this enriches a long-neglected classic by placing
it in a tangible and lively real-world context, with many possible outcomes
and interpretations.
Book
collections on CD and DVD. A library for the price of a book.