Book review: "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens

It was not the best of books. It was not the worst of books. It was, uh, somewhere in the middle. 

When I first began reading "A Tale of Two Cities" I knew little about it. Sure, I knew it was a classic by Charles Dickens, but I had no idea what it was about or whether a book from 1859 would be good reading in in 2026.

As it turns out, "A Tale of Two Cities" is good reading — in parts. It is also, unfortunately, overlong and overwritten.

The strength of the book lies in its portrayal of France before, during and (mostly) after the French Revolution. While it's called "A Tale of Two Cities," and there are some scenes in London, it's mostly a story set in and around Paris.

Dickens portrays pre-revolutionary France as a time of horrid inequities. The rich, the powerful, and the royal live in castles and on estates, well removed from the sufferings of the hungry masses. In one scene, a wealthy man's carriage runs over and kills a poor boy; the aristocrat tosses a coin to the child's father as compenation and then continues on.

Elsewhere, Dickens describes a youth who was sentenced to have "his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view."

It's enough to drive a people to revolt, and they do. Midway through the book, Dickens shows the French rising up and storming into the Bastille. 

But the joy of the revolution soon gives way to the horrors of the Reign of Terror, when thousands of people were executed at the guillotine — what Dickens coldly calls "the National Razor."

"It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted, were a rotten red ... It hushed the eloquent, struck down the powerful, abolished the beautiful and good."

Dickens describes rivers choked with drowned execution victims, and a daily parade of the condemned through the streets of Paris, many them innocent people swept up in the chaotic ferver of the day. A vengeful populace, the author says, was "headlong, mad, and dangerous" and demanded retribution against foreigners or anyone even remotely associated with the aristocracy.

Is this an accurate portrayal of the time? Honestly, I don't know enough about that era to say. But the images Dickens paints will stick in your mind. 

Still, to get to these sections of the book, the reader has some work to do. You must wade through a disjointed plot, elliptical and repetiive writing, stilled dialogue, and wooden characters.

Dickens can be witheringly sarcastic, skewering the arrogant, the rich and the smug, but he is often too much in love with his own words. He seems to never settle for saying something in one sentence if he can do it two, three or four. He prefers the longer and the redundant over the short and simple.

At one point, he says "More months, to the number of twelve, had come and gone" rather than "A year had passed." Later, he writes "Fifty-two were to roll that afternoon on the life-tide of the city to the boundless everlasting sea," rather than "Fifty-two were to be executed that afternoon."  (These are but short examples; there are longer ones, but I don't wish to bog down this review.)

Dickens' wide-ranging plot goes from bewildering to borderline brilliant. In the first half, like someone dumping out the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the author scatters an assortment of seemingly disconnected plot lines. Characters are introduced, developed and then disappear. Events and secrets from the past are hinted at, but then dropped. The story abruptly jumps ahead in time, leaving behind questions unanswered 

For a reader looking for cohesiveness, it can be frustrating.

But in the second half, Dickens slowly takes all those disparate puzzle pieces and fits them cleverly into his grand saga. Almost everything from the first half has a place, an important role. It is quite masterful and impressive, though tempered by one factor: The book is so long, it can strain a reader's memory to recall the elements from the first half that become relevant in the second. 

I wish I could suggest a strategy for the prospective reader to get the rewards of "A Tale of Two Cities" without the poorer elements, but they are well intertwined. I will say that the book's weakest part is the start; I suggest skimming the first three chapters, which are filled with a lot of vague allusions that are difficult to understand. Don't get bogged down there, move on as quickly as you can to Chapter 4. The book gets better as you go along.