Paul Alkazraji's Blog - Posts Tagged "a-tale-of-two-cities"
A far, far better historical thriller
Paul Alkazraji on a ‘Tale of Two Cities’, Sydney Carton and Paris...
Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton in the 1958 film version.
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...’ begins Charles Dickens’ thrilling novel set in England and France during the turbulent years of the French Revolution. It tells the story of the return from London to Paris in 1792 of Charles Darnay, the Marquis of Evremonde, an aristocrat who had renounced his title and privileges, to help a forlorn servant in his former household. The lives of all those around Darnay - his wife Lucie, her father Doctor Manette, the lawyer Sydney Carton and spy Barsad - become bound into the ensuing intrigue and danger.
Dickens describes so well the wild, fickleness of the mob gathered for Darnay’s trial at the Conciergerie, and the sense of evil abroad in Paris at night as the people sharpen their weapons on a bloody grindstone in the St Germain courtyard of Tellson’s Bank. The callousness of the aristocracy is accounted for too, as a relative of Darnay’s ploughs over a child in his carriage and horses and tosses a few coins out of the window in ‘compensation’.
The book details how social injustice and the abuse of power led to a merciless vengeance on the aristocratic class. Personifying it is the Republican ringleader, Madame Defarge, who knits, mechanically adding the names to the register for vengeance at her wine shop with other revolutionaries: they who refer to each other in code as ‘Jaques’. “Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop, but don't tell me,” she says, as the ‘Reign of Terror’ rises to its excesses.
Whilst reading the novel on a recent trip to Paris, I felt able to enter through its pages into the city’s history. The dark iron keys from the Bastille fortress lay in a glass cabinet at the Carnavalet Museum, and the paintings there depict scenes from the period vividly in oil. At the Conciergerie were the straw-floored cells where suspects were kept before being brought for trial at the Revolutionary Tribunal upstairs. Queen Marie Antionette’s cell is left as it is thought to have been. At the ‘corner of last goodbyes’ in the women’s courtyard, the condemned waited for the tumbrils to take them to the Place de la Concorde - the losers in the ‘lottery of Sainte Guillotine’.
‘A Tale of Two Cities’, a reference point for my own novel ‘The Silencer’, sweeps towards a tense climax and the central act of Sydney Carton’s self-sacrifice for the good of Lucie Manette and her family. As Carton walks through the streets of Paris and lingers by the River Seine contemplating all the faults and mistakes in his own life, the words of Christ rise within him, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, even though he is dead, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die’. And so the famous words ascribed to Sydney Carton as he ascends the scaffold in his final moments are: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Ce est un livre superbe!
By the author:
Dirk Bogarde as Sydney Carton in the 1958 film version.
‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...’ begins Charles Dickens’ thrilling novel set in England and France during the turbulent years of the French Revolution. It tells the story of the return from London to Paris in 1792 of Charles Darnay, the Marquis of Evremonde, an aristocrat who had renounced his title and privileges, to help a forlorn servant in his former household. The lives of all those around Darnay - his wife Lucie, her father Doctor Manette, the lawyer Sydney Carton and spy Barsad - become bound into the ensuing intrigue and danger.
Dickens describes so well the wild, fickleness of the mob gathered for Darnay’s trial at the Conciergerie, and the sense of evil abroad in Paris at night as the people sharpen their weapons on a bloody grindstone in the St Germain courtyard of Tellson’s Bank. The callousness of the aristocracy is accounted for too, as a relative of Darnay’s ploughs over a child in his carriage and horses and tosses a few coins out of the window in ‘compensation’.
The book details how social injustice and the abuse of power led to a merciless vengeance on the aristocratic class. Personifying it is the Republican ringleader, Madame Defarge, who knits, mechanically adding the names to the register for vengeance at her wine shop with other revolutionaries: they who refer to each other in code as ‘Jaques’. “Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop, but don't tell me,” she says, as the ‘Reign of Terror’ rises to its excesses.
Whilst reading the novel on a recent trip to Paris, I felt able to enter through its pages into the city’s history. The dark iron keys from the Bastille fortress lay in a glass cabinet at the Carnavalet Museum, and the paintings there depict scenes from the period vividly in oil. At the Conciergerie were the straw-floored cells where suspects were kept before being brought for trial at the Revolutionary Tribunal upstairs. Queen Marie Antionette’s cell is left as it is thought to have been. At the ‘corner of last goodbyes’ in the women’s courtyard, the condemned waited for the tumbrils to take them to the Place de la Concorde - the losers in the ‘lottery of Sainte Guillotine’.
‘A Tale of Two Cities’, a reference point for my own novel ‘The Silencer’, sweeps towards a tense climax and the central act of Sydney Carton’s self-sacrifice for the good of Lucie Manette and her family. As Carton walks through the streets of Paris and lingers by the River Seine contemplating all the faults and mistakes in his own life, the words of Christ rise within him, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, even though he is dead, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in me shall never die’. And so the famous words ascribed to Sydney Carton as he ascends the scaffold in his final moments are: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Ce est un livre superbe!
By the author:
