I enjoyed the plot of The Tale of Two Cities

By which I mean the construction of the plot, the mechanism, the solution to the puzzle.   All of which is mere metaphor, but I hope is clear enough.  A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens’s 1859 fantasy of the French Revolution, is well-plotted.

Many Dickens novels are not.  The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), which I wrote about back at the dawn of Wuthering Expectations, has, which is impressive in its own way, an improvised plot.  Many of his novels have quite good plotting up to some point at which Dickens begins to rely a bit too much on novelistic wood glue and duct tape.  One could blame serialization, except that A Tale of Two Cities was serialized, as was the cleverly plotted Bleak House.

I wonder where Dickens started with this book?  At the end, I would guess, by which I mean the last couple of pages – “’It is a far, far better thing that I do’” and so on.  Then he worked backwards – how did that particular character, who may be a bit vague at first, end up in that particular fix, which I will bet was vivid from the beginning.  He has to be in Paris, although he’s English, and the chronology is limited – mid-1792 through mid-1793.  Then he needs a love interest – she barely requires much invention, and, unfortunately, that’s about as much attention as Dickens gives her.  She needs a family, so that creates some more characters.  Perhaps a servant.  Similarly, a villain is necessary, and the French Revolutionary Mob is rather too blobbish for the purposes of a novel, so an actual character or two begins to emerge from the crowd.

Other scenes appear – some, perhaps, alive from the beginning.  A French nobleman murdered in his country house, dagger in his chest, wonderfully gruesome.  A trial, a spy, a smashed wine barrel.  Themes and imagery – red, red, red – waft up from the story, or the story is knocked about to fit the imagery.  An advantage of a “red” motif is that it can be slapped in pretty much anywhere.

Solutions, what do I mean by that?  About two-thirds in, most of the characters are in London, and Dickens needs them to be in Paris, which they really should not visit at this point in 1792.  Dickens has to find a way to spur each one to Paris.  He needs not just one solution but several.  None of his choices are entirely arbitrary, none of them are entirely implausible (although one fellow does have quite bad luck), all of them are prepared earlier in the novel, even if, looking back, I see that certain hooks were screwed into the wall only to await these particular bits of plotting.

It’s all, in other words, artificial, visibly artificial, but ingeniously, pleasurably so.  Dickens is constrained by the events of the French Revolution, but not much else.   Some oddities still protrude, particularly the unchanging agelessness of most of the characters, even though the novel covers an eighteen year span.  The geography can be strange, too, as a single village stands in for the French countryside, and a single neighborhood* represents impoverished Paris.

The story is not bad, either, but it’s the brilliant plotting that averts the gaze from the story’s nonsense, that makes the story look almost plausible.  Enjoyable stuff.

*  It’s Saint Antoine, home of one of Victor Hugo’s Surrealist 1848 barricades, the one that prefigures environmental art and the sculpture of Gordon Matta-Clark.