The long day's task is done, almost!

Completely unaided (except for extensive help from Paul Squared) the ravages of the storm have been somewhat mitigated. The fences which were put up previously have survived the absolute calm which is the vicious weather of Wales now that it has smashed my fences. The new fences are in place and are painted. I (with extensive help from Paul Squared) intend to assay an attempt to fill in the two difficult spaces vacated by fences in the back. Here, even the locating fence post has rotted and broken, so I (extensively helped by Paul Squared) will have to start from scratch and actually do something which takes a real measure of technical ability. All is lost!

On firmer ground, ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ is read and a remarkably dark novel it is too. Once again the eponymous hero is one of the least interesting characters in the book. His smug morality shining in its self effacing spotlight is nauseating. When he finally does something ‘reprehensible’ by not admitting his admiration of Madeline Bray to the Cheerybles he shows his true priggishness by his rejection of her presence later in his mother’s house as being unbecoming. He’s inhuman! Just like his intolerable sister. Can you imagine going for a drink with those two: what a delight that would be!

The view the novel gives of sex is thoroughly disturbing. Sir Mulberry Hawk is a truly repulsive character and his assault on Kate is vicious and deeply sensual. Ralph Nickleby’s reaction to his niece is also ambiguous. The similarities between Nicholas and Kate are constantly emphasised: loving one is loving the other; sexual confusion is a natural concomitant of the physical link between the siblings. Marriage (although the easy way out at the end of the novel) is not seen as something which is positive through the course of the novel. Partnerships are shown to be destructive, dysfunctional, unequal, vicious, and vacuous: the Mantolinis; the Nicklebys; the Squeers; the Kenwigs; the Lillyvicks. The working marriage of the Crummles is histrionic rather than emotional: the only happy couple are the Browdies. Generally speaking the happy people are those who are single and who are still single at the end of the novel. The marriage of Tim and Miss La Creevy is perhaps the apotheosis of a happy marriage of two single people with no real hint of the sexual between them – they are ‘old friends’ reunited.

This novel is full of monsters: the gargoyle Squeers; the reptilian Gride; the coldly inhuman Ralph Nickleby; the predatory Hawk; the empty Lord Frederick; the pathetic Smike; the relentlessly philanthropic and completely unbuisness-like Cheerybles; the manic Newman Noggs; the camp pripiasm of the affected, sexually ambiguous Mantolini, and so the catalogue of Dickensian grotesques grows. For me, however, one grotesque stands head and shoulders above all the others in the novel: Mrs Nickleby!

She has a pernicious ignorance which makes Jade Goodie look like a PhD student. All the others at least admit to themselves their weaknesses: at some point the ‘real’ character emerges, they dissimulate no longer and rejoice in their own frailty (or strength!) Mrs Nickleby is an exception; she is well matched with lunatic in the small clothes except no one comes to take her away and lock her up as she well deserves to be. She is wilfully small minded, bigoted and selfish to an astonishing extent: she is the female version of Homer Simpson!

I enjoyed reading the novel more this time around; a macabre experience, but one I would recommend to anyone who has a spare moment to read the 800 pages it takes to get Nicholas and Kate married.