A few weeks ago when I was wondering if anyone had used Dickens as a foundation for fantasy books the way people use Shakespeare, the book A Far Better Thing by H.G. Parry was recommended both here and on Blue Sky. I read it last week, and it was so good.

This book is a retelling of A Tale of Two Cities, told from Sydney Carton’s perspective, with the premise that Charles Darnay was his changeling. Carton was abducted by fairies as a small child, with Darnay left as his changeling, then Carton was returned to the mortal world and given a new identity, but he’s still under the command of the fairies as a mortal servant. Mortal servants aren’t ever supposed to meet their changelings, but a court case brings them together, and Carton starts to suspect that there’s something going on in the fairy realm. When the French Revolution happens, Carton finds himself dealing with a family history he’s just started to discover, multiple factions of fairies and their own conflicts, plus the effects of the fairies interfering in the mortal world, along with the woes of the mortal world.

I haven’t read A Tale of Two Cities since I was in high school, so I don’t know if this meshes perfectly enough with it that you could read A Tale of Two Cities and imagine that this is what’s going on in the background and behind the scenes, but that’s the feeling I get from it, that the two books would mesh pretty well, with this one explaining things in A Tale of Two Cities, like two entirely unrelated people being so identical that they can pass for each other. I was the weird kid in high school who actually enjoyed reading A Tale of Two Cities. We were assigned a certain number of chapters a day, but I ended up just reading through the whole thing, and I remember crying at the end. Now I want to re-read it with this book in mind. I was on team Charles Darnay because I tend to like the nice guys rather than the bad boys, and the drunk wastrel of a lawyer held no appeal for me. This book explains why Carton’s a drunk — the fairies have a harder time finding him and knowing what he’s up to when he’s drunk or when alcohol’s around. I also now have a very different view of Carton based on this new backstory.

I found this book to be utterly engrossing. Even though I knew how it would end (unless it somehow changed the ending), I kept turning pages to see what happened. The depiction of the fairy Realm was interesting (and somewhat reminded me of my version from my Fairy Tale series — we seem to have used some of the same folklore source materials, though I never got into changelings and related topics and I took it in a very different direction). Really, the whole thing is a clever and fresh kind of fantasy.

Though I still think it would be interesting to take the plot of something like Bleak House and put it in a fantasy world. It might also be interesting to see what this author could do with Our Mutual Friend, set in this same universe, since that one also involves unrelated people who are identical enough to be mistaken for each other. That one might be a bit more challenging, though, since the double who’s not the book’s main character gets killed early in the book, so it would have to be a prequel leading up to the events of the book to give much of his point of view.