Revolution is an uncontrollable beast. We needn't look any further than the recent Arab Spring to divine this much. Once the will of the people to be free, of tyrants and tormenters, of oppression and corruption, has been ignited, no one can say where it will end. For no one can steer a revolution. It has a life of its own, as the gripes of the masses are vividly expressed and must needs run their course. Some revolutions, like the one executed by colonial Americans against the British empire, end in peace, in this case the construction of a mighty nation that would go on to rule the 20th century. But others, like the French Revolution which descended into the mass-slaughter of Frenchmen by other Frenchmen, are not so tidily concluded. In fact, these go on to create lasting wounds that take generations to heal, assuming they heal at all. It is this latter type Mr. Dickens chose to explore in this, his most memorable and difficult work.
In the latter decades of the 18th century, France underwent a sociopolitical convulsion the likes of which the modern world had never seen. Beset by disastrous economic conditions which, at one point, necessitated that french workers devote most of their wages to purchasing staples as basic as bread, the country finally erupted in a revolution that tore down the French monarchy and established, in its stead, notionally democratic rule. However, through arrogance, ignorance, mismanagement and the petty settling of scores, the French democracy, instead of accreting towards stability as the United States had done less than a decade earlier, devolved into nihilistic chaos known today as the Terror which took the lives of 40,000 French citizens and launched the age of politically motivated mass-killing.
Against the backdrop of this national nightmare stands Charles Darnay. The nephew of a French marquis assassinated for his abject cruelty, Darnay somehow grew up a man of virtue in a world of unregulated privilege. Rejecting both the teachings and the savagery of his uncle, Darnay falls in love with Lucie Manette, the Anglicized daughter of a French doctor who, after spending 18 years in the Bastille as a victim of the crimes of the nobility, is an eccentric, neurotic mess. Despite this trauma, Dr. Manette, who now lives in England as well, blesses Darnay's marriage to his daughter which lasts only a handful of happy years before Darnay is drawn, by his conscience, back to France- where he is identified as a former nobleman, arrested for presumed crimes and thrown headlong into a show trial that will surely see him executed.
Ensnared in the insanity of the Terror, Darnay nonetheless has powerful advocates fighting for him, advocates who believe in his goodness. But the French bloodlust is a vicious and demanding mistress. And nothing short of a death will satisfy her.
Though A Tale of Two Cities concerns, in the main, the French Revolution and the extent to which its indiscriminate violence entrapped countless innocence in its murderous wake, it is, at its heart, two tragic love stories. The one Mr. Dickens lavishes the most attention upon is Darnay and Lucie whose innocent happiness is sundered by the savagery of French patriots who, having killed so often and so mercilessly, have lost their way and their sanity. Here, though the author is none-too-subtle with his foreshadowing, Mr. Dickens successfully portrays the divisiveness of discord and the extent to which it encourages its most violent, human practitioners to arrogantly presume the guilt of those who only appear to be guilty. But though the novel spends far less time with it, it is the second love story that drives both the plot and serves as the harshest critique of authoritarian rule.
It concerns the decimation and the eventual destruction of an entire family at the hands of a vicious nobleman so transfixed by his own pleasure, and so secure in his own superiority, that he gives not a second thought to crimes as profound as rape and murder. These injustices light a vengeful fire in the hearts of peasants who are so determined to gain their revenge, to right abominable wrongs, that they overcompensate for their loss and fuel the very nihilism that destroys the democratic state the French Revolution promised to deliver.
These intertwined tragedies allow Mr. Dickens to make potent points about human nature. Firstly, people are not cruel in a vacuum. They are either made cruel by a system that allows them to be so, or they are driven to it by cruelty done to them. Secondly, and more importantly, once that cruelty is done, how can it be redeemed? How can a sin, or a lifetime of sins, be rectified? Absolved? Or can they be taken back?
A Tale of Two Cities is a difficult novel shackled by dated prose. It cannot be said to be an enjoyable experience. But the extent to which it is a rumination on revolution, its social, political and economic causes, and the myriad ways in which humans react to these, it is wonderfully poignant. A slog, but there are diamonds to be mined here, mined and treasured. (3/5 Stars)
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