G. K. Chesterton famously remarked of Dickens’s characters that they were “immortal souls who existed whether he wrote of them or not”, “creatures who were more actual than the man who made them”; Jean-Pierre Ohl’s intriguing novel – at once a mystery story, an anatomy of literary envy, and a box of intertextual tricks – takes Chesterton’s view and pursues some of its more unpredictable and surreal implications, while also managing to return the reader to the Dickensian source material with a fresh appreciation of the imaginative hold it can exert, for good or ill.

Looking back over his life, François Daumal, Ohl’s primary narrator, recalls the formative role that Dickens has played in it, both ministering to his deepest desires and furnishing him with troubling and sometimes unfulfillable new ones. Following his father’s desertion and his mother’s death, François is left in the charge of his invalid grandmother, a virulent misanthrope cunningly disguised as a sweet old lady. (“I’m not a nice person. There’s nothing I can do about it. I have to bother someone. And there’s no one else to hand but you.”) As David Copperfield found imaginative escape in the books from his father’s library (“sitting on my bed, reading as if for life”), so François discovers David Copperfield among the books with which his late grandfather lined the attic, and suddenly finds therein a narrative shape capable of making sense of his life and lending significance to his actions:

The titles of the chapters also made a very strong impression on me. I thought I detected in their simplicity, their reassuring but inexorable chronology – “I am born”, “I observe”, “I begin life on my own account and don’t like it” – a kind of coded language addressed to me, and it seemed possible, by the sole virtue of my index finger, to journey down the long river of my life, to round the cape I had reached at present, and to glimpse the unknown that subsequently awaited me.

As it turns out, that “unknown” enmeshes him in a lifelong association, and eventually a murderous rivalry, with the patrician Michel Mangematin, a fellow Dickensian, and one who shares François’s obsession with the putative solution to the unfinished Mystery of Edwin Drood. It seems that the key may lie in the testimony of one Évariste Borel, a young Frenchman who may or may not have been with Dickens at Gad’s Hill at the time of the fatal stroke in 1870, and Ohl’s narrative interweaves extracts from Borel’s memoir with François’s more recent stories, offering in the process a double perspective on the promiscuous, unpredictable exchange between living and reading that Dickens offers.

Novels which incorporate such intertextual play always run the risk of degenerating into mere games of reference-spotting, or of disappearing altogether up their own artfulness; but Mr Dick, for the most part, steers clear of such pitfalls. Part of this may be down to the particular nature of what Dickens himself, in Borel’s memoir, describes as “The gateway that separates the real world from the world of my books . . . and that I shall pass through sooner or later”. After all, one of Dickens’s most intriguing qualities is the way in which chicken and egg seem repeatedly to change places in his writing, with the result that it can be hard to tell whether he is responding to the world or vice versa: the Uncommercial Traveller essays, for instance, gain some of their force from their reporting journalistically back on a world in which Dickens’s imagination has itself become a noticeable presence. In this light, it is easier to understand why he has lent himself so readily to metafictional reworkings.

But where Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs replayed Dickensian motifs as an imaginative form of political critique, Ohl’s focus in Mr Dick is more on the nature and price of readerly obsession, and on creative rivalry as an exercise of power: and in this, it bears more of a resemblance to Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, and to Martin Amis’s fable of literary and sexual jealousy, The Information. If the novel’s thriller-like plot (with its requisite final twist) can leave the reader feeling that everything ties up rather too neatly at the end, there are nevertheless many incidental joys along the way, helped by Christine Donougher's translation: small, felicitous evocations of the pull of fiction, like François’s relish of “the little tidbits with which Dickens had served up the dish, secondary figures, improbable ectoplasms scattered through the thickness of the pages”. At one point in the novel, François’s bookseller friend claims that “beyond a certain point excessive cleverness borders on pure and simple bullshit”; Jean-Pierre Ohl’s sense of the allure of bibliophily is part of what keeps Mr Dick on the right side of that divide.

Jean-Pierre Ohl
MR DICK, OR THE TENTH BOOK
Translated by Christine Donougher
224pp. Dedalus. Paperback, £9.99.
978 1 903517 68 0

Bharat Tandon teaches at St Anne’s College, Oxford. His book Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation was published in 2003. He is completing a new edition of Emma.

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