The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

THE BEST REMARKS I have seen on Our Mutual Friend are made by Adrian Poole in his introduction to the Penguin Classics volume (1997): Our Mutual Friend boasts less confidence than earlier works in its own last judgements. It finds a truer sense of its deepest attention in the moments of suspense. As if the writer and his readers were poised, like a doctor and his attendants, over the body of a world, the soul of which seems to hover and flicker, between renewal and extinction. The doctor who seeks to revive the dank corpse is only one of the writer's possible guises. There is another doctor who gently eases the passage of a dying child out of this world. And there is plenty of other work to be done over corpses, for coroners and pathologists, for ministers of religion and articulators of bones.

In Poole's view, the title could be read: Death Is Our Mutual Friend. A palpable hit. And yet, to quote Robert Browning, "A common greyness silvers everything. " Poole once amiably disputed my notion that, except for Macbeth and his Lady, Shakespeare subdued the tragedy's characters to a common grayness. With appropriate amiability, I might venture that death and resurrection fuse in Our Mutual Friend in a cosmos so fetid and so fecund that all demarcations are rendered ghostlier even as the sounds of Dickens's diction achieve a new keenness.