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    Our Mutual Friend
    Our Mutual Friend
    Our Mutual Friend
    Audiobook (abridged)11 hours

    Our Mutual Friend

    Written by Charles Dickens

    Narrated by David Timson

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Out of the dust-heaps and dirty streets of mid-Victorian London Dickens creates a classic murder-mystery tale. A dead man is fished out of the Thames by a scavenger and his daughter. Who is he, and how did he get there? His death affects members of all levels of a society permeated by greed. Dickens presents an array of characters both touching and humorous from Mr. Boffin, the ‘Golden’ Dustman, to Jenny Wren the lame doll’s dress-maker. It is a story enriched by disguise and intrigue, whilst the River Thames, symbolising both polluted and renewed life weaves through it all, in this, the last novel Dickens completed.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateMar 1, 2008
    ISBN9789629544959
    Author

    Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is the most popular and, many believe, the greatest English author. He wrote many classic novels, including David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol. Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities are available from Brilliance Audio.

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    Reviews for Our Mutual Friend

    4/5

    867 ratings32 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Whew! Epic, amazing, messy book. I'm glad I re-read it, and I'm glad I've finished re-reading it.

      LIZZIE EUGENE FOREVER.
    • 1/5
      There is something wrong with this recording. About half through it began looping a few paragraphs over and over. As a result parts of the book were not read, and the recording stopped short of the actual ending. It’s too bad. Without this problem it would have been another entertaining reading of an interesting Dickens novel. I will try the alternative recording available in Scribed.
    • 5/5
      David Timson is a wonderful reader. Each character is beautifully brought to life.
    • 3/5
      The reader is excellent, but the sound files aren't intact. Several spots repeat paragraphs.
    • 5/5
      This audiobook was wonderful, but it was broken. On several occasions it repeated over and over the same chapter or several minutes of the story and it never finished telling the story, ending at chapter 117 instead of 120 or whatever it should have gone to. Very frustrating!
    • 3/5
      I loved this book, until the ending, which disappointed.
    • 4/5
      The whole time I was reading this, I felt like I was reading a book that had a prequel to it that I had Missed reading. This was Dicken's intention, as he relates in the postscript. It works well, to keep the reader trying to puzzle out the mystery. A master of characterization, Dickens will have you switching your loyalty back and forth between who you love, who you hate, and who you are holding off judgement, chapter by chapter. In the end, you'll be saying, "I should have known." I like how Dickens used his considerable platform to raise Society's awareness of the plight of those who would be ensnared by Poorhouse laws.
    • 3/5
      Usually it takes a bit to get into a Dickens novel but once I'm in I enjoy them. That was not the case here. I kept reading, but never really got interested in the characters or the various plots. A miss for me, alas.
    • 3/5
      Really hard to read
    • 3/5
      Well, it's Dickens, and I truly wonder after reading this last book in his corpus, what his writing could have been had he not been writing as a serialist. This book is deeper than most, and includes biting satire of the wealthy who inherit their monies as a matter of course. And it delves again into the role that poverty plays in family dysfunction. I guess Dickens saw these two extremes from his personal life and brought their realities to his vast group of readers. Some of the more interesting characters are Betty Higden and poor Johnny, whose close and cloying relationship, well, Betty Higden describes why she has been withholding Johnny from an infirmary better than I ever will. And Dickens introduces the Jewish Mr. Riah as a battered but ultimately good man. And Jenny Wren is a smart, resourceful young woman who shields those whom she loves and scolds her drunkard father as only a daughter can.While there are elements of the plot that are a bit far-fetched, even for the times in which they were written, the character drawing that Dickens does here is still first-rate. But it's still a serialized novel that really would have benefitted from editing had that been available.
    • 5/5
      How I avoided reading so many Dickens novels as an English major in college I do not understand, but I am grateful to whoever donated a set of Dickens novels to the free bin at my local library, because thanks to that donation I managed to read Dombey and Son, Nicholas Nickleby and now Our Mutual Friend. The last is a superb novel, even though one thinks one knows the plot twist early on. Well, it is a plot twist but Dickens has much more in store. A wonderful, surprising novel.
    • 4/5
      A darker story than earlier Dickens (This was his last completed novel). A body is fished out of the Thames and that starts the tale, but it spins off in many directions before, of course, coming back to that original body.
    • 2/5
      Too long. Wikipedia descriptions of characters was useful
    • 5/5
      One of my favorites. First read it on a train. Beginning of my love affair with Dickens. Read it this time on my kindle.
    • 5/5
      I would have given this 5 stars except that there were certain passages (too many in my opinion) which were too obviously Dickens getting on his soapbox and not really relevant to the story. Dickens does this in most (all?) of his novels and I have often enjoyed the sarcastic wit in these asides but for some reason, I found them less funny and more bitter in this novel & therefore less enjoyable. (I will try to track down some examples to include here later)The plot itself I loved. It had all the twists and turns and branches that I appreciate so much in Dickens as well as the wonderful cast of characters. The only thing missing was one or two "light relief" eccentric but harmless characters such as Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield although I suppose Jenny Wren & Mr. Tremlow do fulfill that function to some extent. I was pleased to find that Mr. Boffin hadn't been corrupted by wealth after all. One of my favorite chapters in the last book was the one where the truth is revealed to Bella and then to Silas Wegg. And I loved the happy endings all around with even Eugene Wraeburn surviving and turning over a new leaf once he was married to Lizzie.
    • 4/5
      Moody, dense look at Dickens's London characters. The city and river as wonderful characters.
    • 3/5
      Very difficult to get into and several extraneous characters who did little to move the plot forward. But the many threads came together nicely and happy endings were in store for most. As this was the last completed novel of Dickens, it struck me that he was yearning for a happy ending for himself at that point in his life.
    • 4/5
      Quite a typical Dickens; full of humour, satirical, and a great read.I very much enjoyed it and liked the story a lot; I enjoyed the different characters, who are all in a way charicatures of the type of people they represent. I found it a bit hard at the beginning, especially because there are a lot of different characters introduced, but I really got drawn into it. It's a book that really makes you feel for the people in it, it gives you a sense that you are close to them and makes you wish for the best for all of the nice people, and wish for something dreadful to happen to the bad people...With a twist at the end, Dickens manages to do just that: the bad people are punished, the good are rewarded and live happily ever after. Though I found the ending somewhat unlikely, it did make for a nice twist to the story, and it was certainly unexpected.
    • 4/5
      An excellent story, though it does drag a bit in parts. I saw the BBC TV production which I loved before reading the book and may have found the written version a little lackluster in terms of character development compared to the TV version. It is a very good story, likely with more elements of surprise if you haven't seen it first.
    • 4/5
      This rivals Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities as my favorite Dickens, though now I want to reread Hard Times and Bleak House to make sure.
    • 5/5
      Wacky, moving, and generally delightful! This novel has sold me on Dickens.

      Similarly to The Mill on the Floss, this novel makes bitter that I cannot go find a Dickens fandom on the Internet. English class is good and all, but there's much less in the way of squeeing. I guess I will simply have to force everyone I know to read it....
    • 4/5
      It took me 5 weeks to read the first 300 pages, and then a week to finish the last 500. Oh Dickens, why did you get paid by the word? I didn't think he would ever stop introducing new characters, but being Dickens, he brought it all together beautifully. I found one of the most interesting characters to be the schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone. Generally Dickens is very black and white in his characters, and the schoolmaster is a pretty black character, but he was more pathetic in his blackness instead of pure evil. I even found myself sympathizing with him a little bit. And, as usual with Dickens, I'm really glad I kept reading.
    • 5/5
      Our Mutual Friend is my new favorite book. This is the last novel Dickens completed before he died, and critics seem to agree it is his most mature. The river Thames plays such a major role in the novel that it is almost a character; it is the scene of many of the novel's major events, including five drownings and one resurrection. There is a dead miser, an expatriated son who apparently drowns in his way to claim his inheritance, and two beautiful women who are sought after by various deserving and undeserving characters. For the panorama of human vice and virtue, Dickens cannot be bested. I read this novel slowly, in part because I really didn't want it to end.
    • 5/5
      Wonderfully illustrated. By far the best. Charles Dickens classic written.
    • 4/5
      Time has slipped away from me on reviewing this book, so I'll be briefer than I meant.This is very Dickensish Dickens indeed. He delves into the littlest-known professions of London's economic underbelly, makes endless and intricate mock of the empty hearts and minds of the money- and status-obsessed nouveau riche, weaves a terrifically complicated plot, and engages in all the heart-rending melodrama for which you either hate or love him. He makes some amends here -- Riah, a noble Jewish character unable to escape the stereotypes others lay on him seems a clear apologia for Fagin. Jenny Wren's complex and fallible character may comfort a few who find the saintly Tiny Tim, Dickens's most famous disabled child, hard to take. (Jenny Wren has her twee moments as well: troops of angels visiting her in her worst childhood moments, Boz? Really?)The story is sprawling, of course, but its central theme is the corrupting effect of money. I found the central story and the characters of the Boffins effective and surprisingly poignant. The nouveau riche storyline, featuring the Veneerings and Lammles, was the least appealing to me. The descriptions of the Veneerings and their doings were so stylized as to occasionally lose focus, I thought, and I found Georgiana Podsnap frustrating to the point of apathy. This is late Dickens, and while as I say his melodramatic tendencies are in full force, there are more variations in moral fabric, more surprises about people's true natures and capacities, than I feel I find in some of his earlier novels. It's a rich book, full of unhappy love, fierce determination, human folly, and of course startling evocations of Victorian London. It's huge and complicated, but full of memorable images and people. A necessity for Dickens lovers.
    • 5/5
      Certainly my favourite Dickens, and one of my favourtie books ever. Eugene Wrayburn is brilliant, Bradley Headstone truly disturbed and disturbing. It's incredible how Dickens managed to draw the character with such small actions. All the characters are drawn perfectly and the plot is wonderfully intricate and absorbing. It is difficult to get into and you might wonder what it's all about to start with, but it's worth sticking with!
    • 3/5
      A bit dull for Dickens. Read something else of his!
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this Dickens immensely and read it just before the brilliant TV drama adaptation came out. David Morrisey is Bradley Headstone (the creepy infactuated teacher), one of the McGanns is the love interest and 'Miss Toner' of Tutti Frutti is the crippled ?seamstress...I've forgotten now! Anyway book and TV drama fantastic.
    • 4/5
      Have tried Dickens before and had a hard time getting through it, but this one was wonderful, I didn't want the story to end.
    • 5/5
      Narrator (Robert Whitfield a/k/a Simon Vance) does an excellent job with the many voices. 31 hours makes for a very long book, so I stopped halfway to listen to a completely different book, and came back to this one after that. An awful lot of sub-plots, that are (for the most part) well-resolved by the end.