Bleak and bleaker.

• Author: Normey, Robert
• Position: Law and Literature - Comparing ''Bleak House'' and ''The Quincunx''

I recently read The Quincunx, a novel I'd been given some years ago. A quincunx is a pattern of five objects in which four occupy the corners of an imaginary square and the fifth is placed in the centre. The novel was published in 1989 and was a resounding success. It was Charles Palliser's first novel, taking him a dozen years to research and write. The painstaking care with which it was written is evident on every page. The lengthy novel is an entrancing recreation of a Victorian novel. The reviewers make frequent comparisons with Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Indeed, according to the Toronto Star, The Quincunx is a marvellous book, far out-Dickensing Dickens and out-Collinsing Collins in its turns and twists.

I think that The Quincunx bears interesting comparisons with Dickens' Bleak House in its treatment of the law. Both novels deal with a Chancery suit in which major characters may or may not be heirs to what seems an incredible fortune.

Dickens provides an unforgettable depiction of the Court of Chancery with its glacial, soul-destroying procedures. He opens Bleak House, set in the 1820s, with a famous description of London on a muddy and foggy day in November. Here is part of that opening:

"Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day, in the sight of heaven and earth. On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here--as here he is--with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog."

The Quincunx also begins with a description of lawyers at work. A meeting has been arranged between the two chief branches of the law--Law and Equity. The representative of Law has been requested to attend at Equity's law office in order to discuss the existence of a document that will damage the interests of Equity's client. Equity offers some money to Law in return for some assistance in the Chancery lawsuit. The chapter ends as follows:

"Law rises with his eye on the thing on the table. Seeing this Equity carelessly pushes it towards him and he slips it into his pocket. Just as the door opens and the clerk appears...