Monday, January 26, 2009

Book Review: Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Here's the beginning of my post on Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, the book that Desmond has saved to read before he dies:

From the introduction (Penguin Classics edition) to Our Mutual Friend:

'Most of the life in Dickens's last completed novel tends to a state of suspended animation. Nothing seems certainly dead nor entirely alive."


Well, if that motif doesn't relate to the TV series LOST . . . Fans have been trying to decide whether the survivors of Oceanic Flight are alive or dead or someplace in-between ever since the series began.

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The entire review was written as season three ended showing us that some of the Losties had indeed left the island, alive or moving in time or something. So, we now know that they're not "in-between" (purgatory), but do we, even in season five, know who's really dead, who's pretending to be dead, and who's only mostly dead? Dickens' VIctorian novel of death and pretended death and hiding from the real world is even more apropos as we enter this season of the Dead Speaking and the Live Returning.

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