Dodge & Twist by Tony Lee
My rating: 2 of 5 stars A Disappointing and Unconvincing Victorian Heist Drama Imagine that twelve years older Oliver Twist returns to London after his adoptive father Mr. Brownlow has passed away, and, still innocent and gullible, soon finds himself under the sway of the Artful Dodger, who involves him in an overly elaborate and highly unconvincing heist plot in an Audible Original Drama called Dodge & Twist (2018) by Tony Lee. It goes without saying, but despite inserting other characters from Dickens’ original novel (including Noah Claypool, Charly Bates, and the “ghost” of Fagin) and a few new ones written for Dodge and Twist (2018), Lee is no Dickens and his drama no Oliver Twist. It is often entertaining, and endowed with surprises (dodging and twisting) and some 19th-century London details like Newgate Prison, street urchins, and police (called “crushers”), but the characters are unappealing, Oliver disappointing, the action unbelievable, and the dialogue often off, so that even though it’s only about 4.5 hours long and free to Audible members to boot, I started wondering if it was worth spending time on. I would have preferred less heist and more social commentary re poverty and the class system. There are some excruciating scenes, as when Betsy, the younger sister of the ill-fated Nancy from the original novel, working in tandem with Oliver, tries to seduce Percival Bateman, a stuffy British Museum expert, leading to embarrassing dialogue between, Oliver, Bateman, and Betsy, with Betsy calling the guy Percy one moment, Mr. Bateman the next, and acting coarsely and transparently fake. I can’t believe that in the 1850s people would say things like, “Perhaps we could go to dinner” and “I do. I do like you.” They wouldn’t talk so casually and so suggestively to each other so quickly. I don’t believe any of this part of the story at all. And it’s all in the service of one element of Dodger/Fagin’s intricate heist plan. More corny dialogue occurs, like: Oliver is “an innocent in a room full of vipers all ready to strike,” and “Follow those carriages!” and “This ends now,” not to mention, “We end this now.” Being a product of the 21st century, Lee writes a plethora of pistols into his drama (there are way too many one-shot pistols) and makes his characters more morally ambiguous than Dickens’, good figures from the novel like Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Grimwig, and Oliver’s father receiving compromising back stories and bad guys from the novel like Noah and Fagin having some sympathetic touches brushed on them. Being an audible drama, this production features sound effects and urgent, strident violin music. Often there will be some violent action and we hear the characters grunting or shouting but have no idea what’s happening till the aftermath of the action explains what just happened, a drawback to the radio-drama medium as produced here. The voice acting is generally fine. I preferred Terry Pratchet’s earlier novel Dodger (2012), which presents the Artful One as a “tosher,” exploring and searching the labyrinthine network of sewer tunnels under London, a Fagin figure, a young social reformer reporter type called Charles Dickens, and so on (but no Oliver Twist). If you can get Dodge and Twist for free and are in the need of a diverting though at times exasperating four-and-half-hours’ entertainment, and are a fan of Oliver Twist, you could try this, and I was not enticed by the prospect of a sequel broadly hinted at in the end. View all my reviews
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The Far Side of the World by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Cape Horn, Whales, Jonahs, Amazons, Weather In the tenth novel in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series of age of sail novels, (1984), Post-Captain Jack Aubrey and his best friend, naturalist, surgeon, and spy Stephen Maturin are off again aboard the HMS Surprise, this time around Cape Horn to the Pacific to protect British whaling ships from the depredations of the USS Norfolk. The War of 1812 is ongoing, and the French and British are still at war. The beginning of the novel summarizes the climax of the previous novel (Treason’s Harbour) and then details Jack’s efforts to outfit his ship and its crew of 200 men with provisions for six months. He adds to his crew the 40-year-old loser Midshipman Hollom (whom Jack fears may become “a Jonah” aboard the Surprise), a new Master Mr. Allen (who knows whaling and the Pacific), long-time friend Mr. Pullings (who’s now a post-captain without a ship), and the impotent gunner Mr. Horner (who’ll be sailing with his comely young wife). Jack will also have several new midshipmen, little boy sons of fellow captains, and hence will need a schoolmaster, so Mr. Martin, a learned chaplain, will also join the Surprise. Finally, Jack is conned by the port-admiral of Gibraltar into taking on an assortment of “mutineers and maniacs,” most of them “landsmen,” whom he and his officers will have to drill into shape. While Jack is preparing the Surprise, Stephen is sitting atop the rock of Gibraltar, watching the myriad birds from black storks to Barbary partridges passing the strait between Africa and Europe. Stephen also gets his own men to join the Surprise: Mr. Higgins to pull teeth and a huge illiterate guy from the insane ward to be his servant. After leaving Gibraltar the Surprise faces numerous challenges: reefs, rivers, swells, tides, trades, and storms (Jack says at one point “I have never known any commission with so much weather in it”) as well as fraught human relationships. However, apart from one skirmish between castrating Polynesian Amazons and the Surprise crew briefly recounted afterwards to Stephen by a participant and one engagement between the Surprise and an American whaler briefly witnessed from a distance by Stephen, readers impatient for violent naval action featuring ferocious broadsides and desperate boardings may be bored. In lieu of nautical war scenes, O’Brian evokes what it felt like to be at sea on a man of war in the age of sail in various climates and weathers and conditions, as well as to experience the flora and fauna of the jungles of South America and the denizens of the southern Pacific seas (sperm whales in groups of 100-200!) in the early 19th century. Sometimes things are quiet: “The frigate ran sweetly before the wind, in almost total silence, little more than the song of the water down her side, and the rhythmic creak of the masts, yards, and countless blocks, as she shouldered the remnants of the long western swell, with that living rise and turn her captain knew so well.” Sometimes severe: “the world’s grim end, a tall blackness on the rim of the sea that continually flashed white as the rollers broke at its foot and dashed far up the towering rock.” Sometimes sublime: “A tropic bird came clipping fast across the breeze, and circled above the ship, a satiny white bird with a pearly pink flush, and two immensely long tail feathers trailing far behind.” *It doesn’t matter that I often have no exact idea what the men are doing with the ship (e.g., “You must grackle your cables”), because O’Brian writes clearly enough for lubbers like me to follow the action or has Stephen (who has not “not attained the slightest tincture of seamanship”) receive an explanation or explain something to the even more unseamanly Martin. O’Brian writes insightful lines about individual personality (“Wit rarely flashed spontaneously upon him [Jack], which was a pity, since no man took more delight in it, even at infinitesimal doses, in himself or others”) and human nature (“The heart is perverse among all things, and unsearchable”). He’s often funny, as when Stephen tells Jack, “You are not unlike Shakespeare . . . Because his clowns make quips of that bludgeoning knock me down nature.” Jack and Stephen and their deep and pleasing friendship also make the novel a pleasure to read, when they’re playing their violin and cello together at night in the Captain’s cabin, dealing with a crisis, or saying to each other something like, “Never distress yourself, brother.” They are the consummate odd couple. Ashore Jack is a gullible fool caught in a web of financial and legal entanglements but at sea is an efficient and successful fighter and leader, “Lucky Jack Aubrey,” while Stephen is “the most hopeless lubber,” swims by drowning, and makes boarding any ship a dangerous adventure but is adept at delicate and dangerous cloak and dagger espionage on land. Indeed, one flaw I felt in the ninth novel (Treason’s Harbour) and in this tenth one is that despite obvious clues Stephen is too obtuse when it comes to the “Judas” traitor selling out the British to the French, the acting second secretary of the Admiralty Andrew Wray. O’Brian says here that Stephen, although experienced, “wary, percipient, and acute . . . was capable of making mistakes,” but it smacks of conflict-enabling plot contrivance. About the audiobook, Ric Jerrom continues to be The Reader for the series, having become for me the voice of Jack (beefy good-natured British) and Stephen (intelligent slightly misanthropic Irish) and their shipmates (and he sings a mean sailor’s song too). Just one flaw: for some reason he several times repeats a clause or phrase, which should have been removed from the audiobook. This entry in the series is solid, but although it avoids ending with a cliffhanger, it does end abruptly, leaving the micro situation unexplained and the macro situation unresolved, so you will be left wanting to start the next novel right away. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
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