Silas Marner

While the rest of my book club has plowed through over 400 pages (i.e. half) of Middlemarch, I larked my way through Silas Marner. At 183 pages in the Penguin Classics edition, it was practically a short story.

And George Eliot is just as good at this length. Her characters are incredibly rich and complex - I feel as though she must have known precisely how they would act in any given situation, not just in those that compose the plot. However, we don't know them perfectly; (perhaps as a consequence of a century and a half) some of their inner life remains a mystery.

Silas Marner is a pretty downtrodden fellow, so pitiable that you wonder how he will hold together an entire novel. And yet he does (albeit a short one). Fate works in mysterious ways over the course of the novel. And while the plot ties together neatly, it doesn't seem contrived.

There are times when the going gets a little rough. Some of Eliot's tangents are less useful than others, and her keen ear for provincial dialect makes for a couple pages of incomprehensible dialogue. But keep going through those pages - it's worth it.