A Far Better Thing, by H. G. Parry

[mrissa]

 

Review copy provided by the publisher.

How much do you like A Tale of Two Cities? Because this is very, very straightforwardly the fantasy version of A Tale of Two Cities. The characters are not renamed, it is about the Manettes and the Evremonds and Carton and Darnay. It's clearly written by a twenty-first century person rather than a nineteenth century one, in terms of percentage of chattiness/digression, but many of the other virtues and vices of the original are present here.

The immediate premise is: what if Carton and Darnay look so much alike because one of them is the changeling left in the place of the other? The theme of doubles is replicated and reduplicated from the original, with changelings and coincidental connections abounding. If that's the sort of thing that annoyed you in the original, be braced. Similarly, this is a book set in the French Revolution that is only glancingly about the French Revolution, which is absolutely true to the original.

Most curiously for me, the gender dynamics of the original have been barely disturbed. Parry has a history of doing much better than that, but once you've chosen to hew this closely to your model, there's only so much to be done, I suppose. I'd be interested to hear if it works at all for someone who hasn't read the original--I wouldn't think so?--and as a result I think the main audience is people who know the original well--and unless you were in a similar position to mine (I remember it from intense study for Academic Decathlon, not from personally enjoying it), that's probably going to mostly be people who liked it.

Comments

[sovay]

Most curiously for me, the gender dynamics of the original have been barely disturbed. Parry has a history of doing much better than that, but once you've chosen to hew this closely to your model, there's only so much to be done, I suppose.

That kind of kills a lot of my interest in the retelling, though! The two film versions I have seen of A Tale of Two Cities are from 1935 and 1958 respectively and both of them actually work to give Lucie some characterization and personhood that she has definitely not gotten from the page. I would have expected a twenty-first-century version to do even more.

[mrissa]

Yeah. Especially coming from Parry I was disappointed. There are two additional female characters, and they're...largely their plot functions rather than something more. The Defarges are largely As Previously. Etc.