Review: Great villains
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 3, 2012
Oliver Twist is one of Dickens' most liked and popular novels.Authors, let this be a lesson to you -- create terrific villains.Oliver Twist himself is a twerpy nobody 90% of the books. Okay, he asks for a second bowl of gruel. He fights to defend the good name of his mother. He walks to London in a week. That's all good, but it's all in the first quarter of the book.Afterward he does nothing but get entrapped by criminals. And be such an obvious goody-goody he becomes the friend of the victims instead.Indeed, the man who has a handkerchief stolen by the other two boys, and the family Bill Sykes tries to use Twist to rob turn out to be not only current friends but related to his real family.No author today could get away with such outrageous coincidences.The ending is a sentimental mishmash. He has a half-brother who hates him, and people are involved in complicated plots I could neither follow nor believe.What makes this novel live on is the portrait of Fagin the leader of a gang of child thieves. And the violent robber Bill Sykes and his girlfriend the prostitute (though you have to read between the lines to figure this out), who started with Fagin as a thief when only 4.Although he avoids direct sexual subjects, Dickens otherwise nothing to pretty up the reality of London's underworld of crime and poverty. Dickens got Twist out of this environment as fast as he could, but was wise to keep going back to the criminals, who are the only interesting people in this novel.Dear sweet Oliver and Rose just make us gag.