Keeley Hawes is also terrific, as the boatman's daughter Lizzie. She was wonderful in The Moonstone, and splendid again as Charlotte Ellison three weeks ago in the A&E production of Anne Perry's The Cater Street Hangman, and whether she's upper-crust or working-class, she always knocks our socks off. I have decided that she deserves better than Paul McGann's dissolute, guilt-ridden, declassed Wrayburn, not even to mention David Morrissey's Bradley Headstone, the mad and murderous schoolmaster. She should even disown her younger brother Gaffer (David Schofield), who's so quick to sell out his class origins. She may in fact be too good for anyone but me, if I were only younger and had a horse. For that matter, Anna Friel's Bella Wilfer deserves more than Steven Mackintosh's John Harmon, even after he has stopped pretending to be a wimpy John Rokesmith. She may be a coquette, but to spy on and test her as if she were a Skinner-box pigeon is contemptible. I like the Boffins (Pam Ferris and Peter Vaughan), and so will you. I hate the Veneerings (Rose English and Michael Culkin), as we're supposed to. Kenneth Cranham's Silas Wegg actually improves on the caricature in the book. Had he met her, Dickens himself would have serialized Margaret Tyzack, who plays Lady Tippins, for another 900 pages.
If you are not familiar with the novel's double plot, tough darts. I'm not about to try to synopsize in three minutes what it takes a public television mini-series six hours to sort out. Suffice it to say that murder and blackmail are involved, as well as seduction and betrayal, and adoption and inheritance, plus alcoholism and grave-robbing, not to neglect disguised identities and Peeping Toms, doll-makers and taxidermists, South Africa and the catacombs, Latin and the law. As always in Dickens, and so often on television, the characters are better at soliloquizing than they are at conversation, as if each, in isolation, were worrying his or her private wound; as if each, like the author, had secret criminal tendencies. And as perhaps too often in the Victorian novel, it all works out a bit too neatly, as if true love and benign coincidence made radical action for social change unnecessary, no matter how squalid and hypocritical the times.
It occurs to me that these dust heaps reappear in The Great Gatsby of F. Scott Fitzgerald. And that this great theme of waste finally found its epic poet in Don DeLillo, whose Underworld sings of pyramids of garbage, from the Fresh Kills landfill to the desert scrap-heap dumping grounds of B-52 bombers, from those Mesozoic salt beds in which we store our radioactive rubbish to the cosmic clouds of slushed fetuses floating in Sister Edgar's rings of Saturn. It's too bad DeLillo couldn't have waited around a little longer for the sight of our very own mayor dispatching his imperial scows of refuse to helpless New Jersey, like Bob Newhart's evil twin or a Flying Dutchman Cleanser.
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