From the book pile

• The Dickens Boy by Thomas Keneally (Atria Books, 2022)
  
  A novel about Edward "Plorn" Dickens, sent to Australia in his teens to try to make something of himself after doing poorly in school, is a great idea. And acclaimed novelist Thomas Keneally (Booker-Prize-winning author of Schindler's List) would seem just the person to write such a novel. His descriptive writing is beautiful, effectively conveying the wonder and enchantment of a young Englishman encountering the sweeping Australian wilderness for the first time. And he handles Plorn's and his siblings' complicated relationship with their father with both realism and sensitivity. So it took me a while to figure out why I wasn't enjoying the book very much. 
  
  I eventually pinpointed two reasons. The first is mainly a matter of personal taste: The book has a loosely episodic structure, without much of a story arc or narrative drive. It's not pushing toward any goal, aside from Plorn's rather vague goal to learn to apply himself and please his father. There's nothing inherently wrong with that sort of structure, but it just doesn't appeal to me much. (There's a reason I prefer late Dickens to early Dickens.)
  
  The second reason is more on the micro level: the often stiff and stilted nature of Plorn's narration. His sentence structure at times feels positively upside down and backwards -- for instance: "The question of whether Father had left the girl anything proved to be part of Alfred's musings, and many people would have said, why not?"  Even in 1869, a more formal period, it beggars belief that an undereducated adolescent would talk like that. And the stiltedness has the added effect of distancing us from the young man instead of feeling that we're really getting to know him. Keneally gets so much else right in this book, I don't know why he had trouble getting the voice right, but I couldn't help wishing he had made more of an effort in that direction. It would have improved the book so much.

• D (A Tale of Two Worlds) by Michel Faber (Hanover Square Press, 2020)
  
  This is another novel related to Dickens by another acclaimed novelist (Faber is the author of The Crimson Petal and the White, among others). And, unfortunately, it's another swing and a miss. I'm sorry, I feel like I'm being a grouch, but this book didn't work for me any better than The Dickens Boy did. It's a middle-grade novel that tells the story of Dhikilo, a young British girl adopted from Somaliland, who wakes up one morning to find that all the "D"s in the world have vanished. No one can say the letter, it's missing from road signs, even things like Dalmatians are disappearing -- and no one seems to notice but Dhikilo. It takes a visit to a mysterious retired professor and a doorway into another world, the Land of Liminus, for her to discover what's happening to the letter D, and what she can do about it.
  
  The plot reads as something of a cross between Alice in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Anne of Green Gables. The trouble is that there's little substance or coherence to it. In Liminus, Dhikilo encounters various characters and places named after Dickensian characters and places, but they don't have much of a resemblance or connection to those elements in Dickens's books. And the story as a whole doesn't hold together; at the beginning we learn all about Dhikilo's problems with her family and her life, but nothing she learns in Liminus helps her deal with those. There's no character arc, no heroic journey, nothing but a bunch of loosely connected episodes without much relation to each other. Again, an episodic structure without a heroic journey can work -- Alice in Wonderland is organized in much the same way, in fact -- but when so many issues are presented at the beginning of a story, you do expect them to be resolved in some way, not to just disappear.
  
  But the worst part of the story, for me, is that the elderly Professor Dodderfield -- clearly meant to represent Dickens -- has a guide dog called Mrs. Nelly Robinson, a shapeshifter who appears sometimes as a Labrador and sometimes as a sphinx, whom he sends with Dhikilo on her journey. Most middle-schoolers won't know this, of course, but Ellen "Nelly" Ternan, by the time she became Mrs. George Robinson, wanted nothing more than to put her relationship with Dickens behind her. So showing the Dickens character being served by a talking animal called Mrs. Robinson is in terrible taste, whether the middle-schoolers are aware of it or not. 
  
  As with The Dickens Boy, I had high hopes for this book -- but again, I'm afraid I was disappointed.