Quigsnip

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog, is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recoment you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay, This time, brief review of Quigsnip: The Untold Story of Charles' Dickens' Oliver Twist (self-published, 2014).

I think its wonderful that Charles Dickens is still inspiring writers to create their own pastiches ans fanfic. Sometimes it's the way novels were originally written that has given authors the inspiration, by way of little unexplained plotholes. Almost all of what we percieve today as stand-alone novels originally appeared as serials in magazines. Oliver Twist, one of his best-known books, took 26 months to tell, and there traces in the completes tale of side stories and characters that might have developed differently had Dickens not been hammering out chapters directly for immediate publication.Academic types have been noticing these little curiosities in his plots for many decades. 

One of those coulda-been avenues in Twist concerns a possible villain, a strange humpbacked person who enters the narrative for a few paragraphs and is never seen again, Writer Sean Phillips has grabbed this character, or rather that possibility of a character, and turned him into the villain Fagin's unseen boss, the vulgar and nasty Mr. Quignsip, and has created a fun, albeit ungainly, adventure  in which Quignsip goes after Oliver for some revenge. 

I call this ungainly, because it is a self-published book that could use an editot to clear away some misspellings and formatting issues, and so what the novel feels like is a promising first draft. The structure of the story is well-paced, exciting, and some of the research seems very thorough. The late 1830s saw Londoners finally start reacting against the workhouses that had sprung up around capital years previously, keeping the city's underclass in a permanent stae of thrall and poverty, and this story reflects the beginning of this social change. 

The prose is clear, and I was never confused by the events. Given a little more work, this could be developed into a good adventure story. With a pair of exceptions, I thought this was a well-done first effort., and I certainly enjoyed the climax, which incorporates the "ghost" stage effect that unnerved many theater-goers of the period.  Unfortunately, I was not sold on a plot strand that required Oliver Twist to be hypnotized, nor the small but important detail of the decade-old Metropolan Police Force having a clue what a fingerprint is, let alone giving credance to one. These are places where a strong editot could have provided a good deal of help to Phillips, building something promising into something satisfying. 

 

Nevertheless, despite these quite major fambles, the book was an entertaining diversion, It might have helped that Phillips was paying attention, not just to Dickens but to his worldview. Dickens, for all his romanticism and melodrama, was a critic of society's failings and of inequality. The heroes of Quignsnip are continuing to make changes in their world that Dickens had them striving toward in his original novel (probably all his novels, actually), and so the story certainly rings true, and may appeal to Dickens' fans and collectors. Given the hiccups of the formatting, and that hypnotism malarkey, I can't give this a very strong recommendation, but I would encourage the author to keep at it, and possibly hire an editor to beat this edition into better shape, that may find home with a publsiher or larger audience.

--Grant Goggans, Bookshelf

 

Quignsip, subtitled The Untold Tale of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, Is Sean Phillips' attempt at a sequal to Oliver Twist. Like Tony Lee's Dodge and Twist, Phillips uses Quignsnip to use to examine characters and situations in the original book and extend their stories on. The main difference is that while Lee goes many years into the future, bringing the Artful Dodger and Oliver back in London as young adults, Phillips takes up clsoer to original source by beginning his tale soon after the events of the original.I guess that the main hero of this book needs no introduction. Oliver is still the same blond haired waif that most are probably familiar with from the film versions of the original novel. We join him as he gives over a chunk of his wealth to a charity aimed at helping orphans like himself. Fagin, Sykes, and the Artful Dodger are all dead, executed for their crimes [Error: Dodger is not dead; he is in Australia]--but one member of the gang remains at large--Quigsnip--and he seeks revenge against the boy who ruined all his plans.And who is Quigsnip? You might be forgiven for thinking that he is the creation of the author, retroactivelyinserted into the original story background in order to justify the tale. That is certainly what I beleived when I started reading the flashback scenes in which our villain reveals himself. However, without fear of spoilers, I can say that the author has thought of this and has provided an interesting justification for his creation based on a throw-away scene from the original novel. His suggestion is that Dickens'may have intended a larger role for this character. Quigsnip carries out his devious plot and Oliver finds himself caught in a dangerous bind that he must use all his wits and charm to defeat. There follows a resonably fun romp through Victorian England. Oliver is deprived of his wealth, his family, his friends and his reputation, and must fight to win them all back. There are many cameos by characters the reader may recognize and, as an extra bonus, the entire town of Coketown from Hard Times plays an important role. There are flaws in the plot. Quignsip's plan, for example, is overcomplicated and full of potential pitfalls that do not get challenged. Of course, this is no different than many schemes carried out by villains in all fiction (including Bond) though there are some fairly major flaws. These include a reliance on hypnosis that seems to have greater power here than it does in the real world--forcing someone to unconsciously perform against their personality, something that even fictional hypnosis considers impossible. Phillips also places Coketown a lot closer to London than it is largely believed Dickens intended it to be, which is the aproximate location of North West industrial town of Preston in Lancashire. This tale places it a lot closer, whin a hundred miles of London. Nevertheless, this is a minor issue and one that does not detract from the tale (unless you are an unforgiving pendant) and does allow Oliver to walk there from London (eventually, even at 100 miles, it is still a long walk). Another issue with the book is that the writing style which I think is trying to mimic the style used by Dickens. This is a laudable effort but it does lead to the text sometimes seeming bloated or stilted. This issue may be due to modern readers not connecting with an essentially now very old-fashioned style, or perhaps Phillips not quite managing to deliver the style in an entertaining way. This is not say the writing is bad, there are in fact areas which it is good, but rather that just as in Karaoke where it is considered a mistake to cover Elvis, it may be ill-advised to try to cover Dickens.Overall, I enjoyed this book, especially the interesting essay at the end where the character of Quignsip is analyzed. Here is revealed the author's love for the source material. The ending to the fictional tale is also satisfying and includes some suitably Victorian melodrama. Well-worth a look.

--unknown blog reviewer.