Love conquers all

Illustration from Bleak House

Bleak House by Charles Dickens may be a long, complex and even convoluted novel, yet its central message seems simple enough. Love and family mean everything. Everything else, not so much.

The entire story circles around, but rarely dips into, a civil suit over a will that has been sitting — rarely moving at all —in court for years, even decades. Most of the novel's many characters are involved in the suit in one way or another. The happiest ones manage to ignore it and just get on with their lives.

Dickens gives us two narrators. One is a young woman named Esther Summerson, raised by a woman not her mother who treated her like sin itself. Upon this woman's death, Esther comes under the guardianship of John Jarndyce, one of the principals in the Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit. Her life and sense of worth improve significantly and don't even change much after a serious illness destroys her physical beauty. Everyone, it seems, loves Esther, as does the reader. Three men want to marry her.

The second narrator is omniscient, who in present tense tells us everything going on that Esther is not a witness to. The characters and subplots are too numerous to mention. Two characters that should be mentioned, however, are Sir Leicester Dedlock and Lady Dedlock, members of the aristocracy who return to the story again and again. Lady Dedlock, whose extreme haughtiness turns out to be a pretense to hide her guilt, has a secret she shares only with Esther.

The novel first appeared in serial form in 1852, so it is worth noting that Dickens gives us one of the earliest detectives in fiction, Mr. Bucket, who investigates both a murder and a disappearance in these pages.

When this is not an exciting detective story, it most often becomes a love story. Couples marry. A son returns to his family, where he is welcomed like the Prodigal. Old couples remember what drew them together in the first place.

Bleak House itself is one of two stately residences described in these pages, and despite what its name may suggest, this turns out to be the happy home, the one where Esther goes to live. It is the other house, where the Dedlocks live, that seems haunted.

I would not rate Bleak House as Dickens's best novel, as many people do — I prefer Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend — yet there is no denying its sweeping power and vibrancy.