BLEAK HOUSE (1985)

THE FILM (Miniseries)

FILM DIRECTOR: Ross Devenish

SCREENWRITER: Arthur Hopcraft

FILM STARS: Denholm Elliott, Suzanne Burden, Jonathan Moore, Diana Rigg, Lucy Hornak, Philip Franks, Chris Pitt, Sylvia Coleridge, Charlie Drake.

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Charles Dickens

TYPE: Novel

PUBLISHER: Pan

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1986

COUNTRY: Great Britain

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1853

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: Drama

WORDS: “Bleak House”, or a tale of long stay travelling prior to the internet and cable TV.

I first read Charles Dickens in 1994, and it was because of necessity rather than choice. That “necessity” led to a lot of joy.

Australian born and raised I was in Croatia for the better part of a year through 1994 into 1995, staying with relatives (on both sides of the family tree). The summer months were, even then quite busy, though not quite the tourist mecca Croatia has become now.

The winter months, like many tourist destinations, were more normal, if there is a normal. I settled into the rhythm of a local, albeit one that didn’t have to work. In between side trips to neighbouring countries, I spent a lot of time with my older aunts and uncles who were wonderful in their oral histories of the family and vivid in their descriptions of times past. But you can only utilise so much of their time. They had lives, jobs and things to do.

Once I had explored the museums, marvelled at the parks, walked around the antiquities I still had time to kill. Not having a job made that quite a bit of time. What now?

Television wasn’t doing it for me. Quality programming was sparse and even though my conversational Croatian was fine I found it difficult to fully understand what was going on, on Croatian television. Perhaps it is because I was brought up on dialect, perhaps it was because they weren’t in front of me speaking to me, perhaps it was because they spoke at the speed of light. Though most of the English-speaking films were subtitled rather than dubbed there weren’t a lot of movies on.

No TV, no DVD, no video, no cable, no internet.

This was a blessing in many ways, and I spent, accordingly, a lot of down time reading. The problem is my reading in Croatian is painfully slow and I needed a quick diversion. I had exhausted the novels I had bought in Britain on the way over, so I spent much time in Croatian bookstores (in Rijeka) searching for novels in English.

What I found (and read), more often than not, were Penguin issued reprints of classics from the 19th or early 20th centuries. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, Daisy Miller by Henry James, The Sea Wolf by Jack London and Charles Dickens.

Prior to that I was an avid reader, but an avid reader of post-World War 1 novels but these “classics” opened my eyes and I read much that I would not have otherwise read.

Hard Times and Great Expectations by Dickens were magnificent.

I came back to Australia and read more of those newly discovered authors and haven’t been disappointed. The language isn’t that old if you don’t want it to be and the narratives and meanings are complex but, surprisingly, easily readable. There is a reason why those books are classics and no amount of revisionism (if there is any) can take that away from them.

Bleak House is up there with the best of Dickens (though it is perhaps the densest of the Dickens books I have read). It is a satirical story about the British judiciary system (specifically Chancery which was a court of law that oversaw cases of inheritance, wills, and disputed works). The novel has a couple of central characters and many well detailed almost central characters affected by the system and its laws. Like much Dickens his criticism of English public institutions and comment on the social inequalities is, in some ways, only a backdrop (albeit a vivid one) to a family drama and the characters who live and breathe through the same. And this is the joy of Dickens – the successful balancing act between the story and the themes, between emotions and ideas, between people and social mores, between observation and criticism.

I can’t speak to this miniseries as I haven’t seen it. Denholm Elliott is always good but whether you like it or not will depend, I suspect, on your tolerance of BBC miniseries of the 1980s. I find them grungy, shabby, stage bound (even when outside) and ultimately “anti-film”. This one I have read is all the above and though long still doesn’t manage the scope of the novel., though, to be fair, this is a common problem of film and TV adaptions of Dickens.

There is no reason not to read the book.