Frederick Busch

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Mouldering Bodies

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Frederick Busch has called his novel about Dickens The Mutual Friend. An alternative title might have been Great Expectorations. (p. 61)

The Dickens reassembled in [The Mutual Friend] pulsates with energy, creative and destructive: fires break out around him as he uses up himself and others in a consuming commitment to his work. But if the figure is vibrant, it is also familiar. There is nothing new in this reconstruction of the novelist and much is romantically naive. A hackneyed stress falls on the usual polarities: the life-lover who frequented morgues and corpses; the bard of the hearth who broke up his home; the prosperous law-abider drawn compulsively towards the derelict and criminal.

Contrasts fascinate Mr. Busch. A few miles or a few years, he keeps emphasising, could make an immeasurable difference to the worlds in which people lived in 19th-century England. Dickens, seen as exploiting this, visits the warrens of the destitute as a sightseer. Alcoholic Dolby, on the other hand, becomes a resident of squalor, and the book heaps hideous details round him as he soggily decays. Filth and disease are itemised with an absorbed inventiveness lacking from the novel's characterisations, so that, finally, the Victorian netherworld and the mouldering bodies of its denizens come to dominate the book. (p. 62)

Peter Kemp, "Mouldering Bodies" (© British Broadcasting Corp. 1979; reprinted by permission of Peter Kemp), in The Listener, Vol. 101, No. 2593, January 11, 1979, pp. 61-2.∗

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