The Thing About Charlie...

I occasionally spend some time ghosting over on Book Blogs at the Ning. Even though book reviews aren't really my main 'thing', I like to see what the book reviewers are talking about and there's always something fun going on over there.

 Over the weekend, the subject of Dickens came up: Is he still relevant? 

Notwithstanding two recent books spun from the stuff of his final (and unfinished) novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, it's an open question. Dickens thus-far seems to have been skipped by the renaissance being enjoyed by other classic authors such as Jane Austen. So... does he need an infusion of post-modern zombies to bring back the readers? Or is he already just another zombie author refusing to shamble off to the churchyard and a peaceful afterlife confined to the shelves of English Lit professors, destined for a messy end on the killing fields of postmodern lit crit?

The main trouble with Charlie is that he was made victim of his own success. So many see elements central to his plots as cliche (Orphans? Wicked stepfathers? That is SO overdone!) but what Dickens did was not cliche -- it was made cliche by endless repetition from the pens, typewriters and laptops that followed him. It's a mental space that a reader needs to get themselves into before embarking upon any of the classics.

This is doubly-true of Dickens, whose plots and twists and characters have become so indelibly woven into modern fiction. His ideas and plots and characters have been endlessly plundered by nearly everyone because his voice was so persuasive that he set the bar that we're all trying to clear. Not long ago I was reading a music critic talk about the number of bands whose entire catalog and careers could be summarized as "Variations on one song from the Beatles' White Album". (I'll have to find the article so I can quote and attribute accurately). So too could many more authors and screenwriters be summed up as churning out endless variations on the source material drawn from Dickens. Some of it has been amazing, epic tales built upon a 'Dickensian' and some of it should remain nameless and fade from our minds. Regardless, the quality of imitation does not strain the strength of the source material.

In a time when optimism is oft times treated as though it were a contagious disease, perhaps the inveterate optimism of Dickens' characters can't catch hold upon the modern mind. Perhaps the moments of astonishingly-modern wit are too weighted with the passages of florid Victorian prose. I tend to disagree. Dickens' voice was so modern and his wit was so sharp that we can still hear ourselves in it.

Still don't think he's relevant? I think he's so relevant that the biggest publishing phenomenon ever doesn't make sense until you view it through his works. There has been no more profound reflection of this influence than Harry Potter. The boy wizard aside, this is a time of literature cast in the light of Hemingway, awash in the blood of a million murdered adverbs. Yet, despite Rowling's cinder-block sized tomes, often grandiose prose, and sweeping tales, even books that are meant to appeal to her audience are pared down and scaled back ever more as writers and publishers chases an allegedly dwindling attention span. Have our attentions really so dwindled, though that we're in need of a zombie incursion into the classics to renew the spark of literature that has aged? I had a love-hate relationship with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And I fear however, that this is going to spawn a trend of duct-taping postmodern monsters into classic tales until it devolves into an Abbot & Costello movie.

In my opinion, P&P&Z only worked because of a brilliant blend of two gifted writers (Austen and Grahame-Smith) hundreds of years apart and it took off because the readers were primed by the Austen renaissance (and in case you've been living in a cave, zombies are kind of a thing right now).

Maybe it's for the better, this mashup culture. If nothing else, before we're ready to receive Little Dorrit Versus the Zombie Debtors of Doom, we'll need to reacquaint ourselves with Dorrit's creator.

However, I'm thinking of shopping around a story about a zombie antihero escaping a zombie-infected prep school to bum around New York for a day. He'll have a thing for ducks, wear a funky red hat and spend a lot of time trying to eat the brains of the prostitutes in he meets...  Just kidding, Mr. Salinger. Just kidding.

But I think you should write down the date and time you scoffed at the notion of Zombiecatcher In the Rye.  Because at this rate, it almost seems inevitable.