Frederick Busch

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The Final Farewell

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[The Mutual Friend is Frederick Busch's] scrupulous recreation in novel form of Charles Dickens and those who attended him in his last years.

The novel begins in [the] 1867 period with Dickens's public readings in America, and the dinner with Longfellow figures in the early pages. "Begins" is a misleading word here, for Busch's admirable technique is anything but linear. With a firm control over his material—he is faithful to the recorded facts and intuitive with his inventions—he presents this account of the years leading up to Dickens's death, and its aftermath, from different points of view. He divides up the task among several narrators….

Each narrator unfolds a separate episode, as well as a separate relationship to the Chief, as he was called, and in so doing reveals facts and circumstances which foretell events leading up to the time of his death. This intent is clarified with the frequent repetition of the question: "Is it not curious how what is written may later come to pass?" This manner of relating the story is both a strength and a weakness. The obvious strength is in the cumulative effect: each time one learns more of what lies ahead. (p. 99)

The weakness, if it is one, of this method, where all the pieces only tally up at the end, as in a dramatic work, is that it does not allow for a deep involvement on the part of the reader—who is occupied in simply keeping track of the pieces. But neither was this Frederick Busch's intention. It was more important to him for the reader to be informed of facts at the right time, facts calculated to make the greatest impact and to give the fullest meaning even at the cost of violating the time-sequence of the story….

Busch's prose is capable of conjuring up in only a few lines specific scenes which put our imaginations to work. His descriptions convey all we need to know….

What Busch's Dickens craves throughout these last years is affection, some permanent and meaningful tie; what he achieves is control—control over the lives and feelings of real people, as well as the fictional ones. He orchestrates whatever and whoever revolves around him, always changing and reshaping, even to the constant redecoration of his house. (p. 100)

[Just before the end of his] life of immense activity and intense personal relationships, Busch's failing Dickens faces his truth: "… success withal, a sense has come crushing upon me … of one happiness I have missed in life, and one friend and companion I never made. And it may be that the man whose blood pours upon the sheets of the charity ward … still does not complain as I do." In the end, Busch has written a book about that larger theme of loneliness in high places….

Frederick Busch's novel … [expresses a] keen sense of personal loss and makes that loss so immediate that in the end the reader himself will forever be more intimately connected with the inimitable Dickens. (p. 102)

Paula Deitz, "The Final Farewell," in The Ontario Review (copyright © 1978 by The Ontario Review), No. 9, Fall-Winter, 1978–79, pp. 99-102.

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