Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens

Dickens’ last completed novel is a dense affair, combining so many plot strands and complex, almost experimental, techniques that I found myself rather at sea at times, especially during the central sections.

It’s also dense thematically. Many familiar Dickensian tropes appear, such as prominent father-daughter relationships, but the ubiquity of death and the ever-present mounds of “dust” towering over London and concealing all sorts of sinister secrets. I wasn’t surprised by the number of Macbeth references revealed by the footnotes, this is even bleaker than, er, Bleak House.