MJ Nicholls's Reviews > David Copperfield

Finished. Having a hard time spinning superlatives for this review. It is more or less established I strongly like, or passionately love, every Dickens novel I read so why not slap a five-star badge on this masterpiece and hop down to Bev’s café for a veggie burger, free sexual innuendo with every purchase, a fly in every milkshake, and a 50p discount on all half-cooked omelettes? Fine. Some highlights. Improvements in characterisation. Notably, the villains. David’s friendship with Steerforth partially blinds the reader to his scoundrelly tendencies until his flitting with sweet Emily. Uriah Heep’s squirminess and umbleness wrongfoots the reader until his scoundrelly tendencies are unmasked (although David outs him as a beast from the start). The first-person narrator opens doors of eloquence in Dickens’s prose hitherto closed in the topographical omniscience of previous works. As usual, a memorable cast of eccentrics, stoics, loveable fuck-ups and social climbers. No sagging secondary plots like in Dombey and Son. Deeply moving passages on the passing of time, memory, penitence, friendship and naïve love (Dora is a female Peter Pan). High-class comedy a-go-go. An enriching experience. Your soul glows reading this. You want more from a book? Geddouttahere. Time for that veggie burger. Open til nine and never over capacity (like fecking GR).