Audible recently launched an adaptation of this Charles Dickens classic (originally published as a monthly serial from 1837 to 1839, and as a book in 1838).

Produced by Sam Mendes, it features a full cast, an original score, and impressive sound effects (so realistic that while listening as I cooked in the kitchen, I involuntarily turned round at one point to see who had come in the door...). The soundtrack includes "Foley recordings captured in Dickens’s former London house at 48 Doughty Street, in the rooms where he originally wrote the novel"...

I don't remember reading Oliver Twist. I owned a copy, it seems (bought in Munster in 1978, according to the mournful-but-must-move-on catalogue of remembrance that I drew up when we were about to leave Australia, and -- of necessity -- part with a massive trove of books.


Oliver Twist was here somewhere...

It's possible I didn't read it (maybe it was part of my tsundoku...). But it's likely I did read it. I was living in Germany at that point, and was homesick, so -- somewhat illogically -- it was a period when I read a lot of English literature. If I did read Oliver Twist, however, I definitely must have forgotten a lot of it (we are talking about a lapse of 45 years, after all...) Many of the details of the dramatization did not feel familiar (and yet, having checked a plot summary, they're largely accurate).

My memories of the story date, rather, from the time when I was a kid, and my father used to accompany his boss to the Hardware Trade Fair in London once a year. This was all a very big deal for people who didn't leave the Island much. Dad being away for a night... Flying... Staying in a hotel in London... And the boss insisted on attending a West End musical, and taking Dad along. I can't remember how many years this went on, or how many musicals Dad saw. But for sure he saw Fiddler on the Roof, and Oliver! (with exclamation mark). I remember because he brought back souvenir LPs (to be played, first, on our very basic record player, and then, later, on the "music centre" to which we'd very proudly graduated), and they very much became part of the soundtrack of my childhood.


Dad, many years after his forays to London, and Mum

Lionel Bart's highly memorable version of Oliver! premiered in the West End in 1960, and played for many years.

Audible's adaptation runs for 3 hours and 38 minutes, and pares down the book's subplots quite considerably. Nevertheless, it vividly brings to life its key themes: on the one hand, the vicious circle of poverty and crime, and the hard, cold, hypocritical nature of Victorian poor relief; on the other, the capacity of good people to do good things, and the always-existing possibility -- despite all odds, maybe even lethal ones -- to switch sides from the bad to the good.

Oliver is an orphan (the book's original subtitle was The Parish Boy's Progress). He finds himself tossed from pillar to post, until he finally falls in with a gang of thieves in London. Led by Fagin, this side is fighting (for various reasons) to make Oliver bad; pitted against them are the angels of light who are trying to rescue him. There's a happy ending (for Oliver), but we come away with a very clear idea of the flukes -- the sheer twists of fate -- that determine who wins out in the end.

I was particularly struck by the performances of Daniel Kaluuya as Bill Sikes (the violent villain whose name strikes terror even into Fagin's hardened entourage, and whose youthfulness -- in this version -- adds a poignancy to his unlikeable character), and of Nicola Coughlan as the feisty Nancy (she's Bill Sikes's girlfriend -- although that's way too cozy a term given the violence she suffers -- and sacrifices herself to become one of Oliver's rescuers).


Off Craven Street, which is where Mr Brownlow, Oliver's protector, resides after returning from the West Indies

At the top of the tree, however, has to be Brian Cox, who plays Fagin. Unless I missed some subtle clues, we have no idea, from this adaptation, that Dickens's original Fagin was a Jew... What we hear is a messed-up, self-contradictory, ultimately pitiable person. He is exploitative, ruthless, and self-pitying, and the fatherly air he initially adopts towards Oliver makes his betrayal of the boy even worse. Yet he treats his gang far better than the workhouse authorities treat their charges... And you do also feel pity for him. He had a terrible start to life, and once headed down the wrong track, he found no rescuing angels. And he's right, of course, that the whole of society is built on thievery; the differences lie in how well you can build a justificatory story to support your theft, and how many members of society you can persuade to back it.

Fagin's Jewishness was controversial right from the beginning. In 1863, Eliza Davis, a Jewish woman, famously berated Dickens for creating what she saw as a malicious caricature: "Charles Dickens, the large-hearted," she wrote, "whose works plead so eloquently and so nobly for the oppressed of his country... has encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew." She was not the first to complain. The Jewish Chronicle had asked, a decade before, why "Jews alone should be excluded from the sympathising heart of this great author and powerful friend of the oppressed". But Eliza gained traction. Dickens was at first defensive. But when she returned to the charge, he took action, not only creating a much more positive Jewish figure in Our Mutual Friend, but also editing out a large number of references to Fagin as "the Jew". A bit late, though... The genie was already out of the bottle.



Subsequent adaptations have taken different tacks.

Bart's musical, notes Marc Napolitano, "is inherently paradoxical: a Jewish East Ender conceived of a stage musical in which the hero is based on an anti-Semitic Victorian literary character. Bart’s reinterpretation of Fagin was more than a 'literary (or musical) license' on the part of an adaptor; it was a bold attempt to present Fagin in a unique and sympathetic light." In Bart's rendition, therefore, Fagin "will prove himself an entertaining showman and Jewish den-mother as opposed to a conniving devil and anti-Semitic stereotype". While Bart wanted to iron out the unflattering stereotype, he still "envisioned the character as identifiably Jewish, as is obvious from the Jewish motifs in Fagin's theme music and solos". (Bart, incidentally, could neither read nor write music... But then apparently neither could Noel Coward or Irving Berlin... And did you know that Phil Collins played the Artful Dodger in Oliver! for a while...? That was in 1964, so maybe he was the Dodger Dad saw...)

The musical Oliver! made its own contribution to the book's evolving "culture text" -- the phrases, images, and ideas that coalesce around a famous story in the popular imagination. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman writes: "As with any adaptation, the musical affects how people view Fagin. When I teach Oliver Twist, for instance, students express surprise at how nasty the novel's Fagin turns out to be because of their previous familiarity with the musical or other popular cultural artifacts influenced by the musical... The affection some viewers have for the musical's Fagin helps them to locate and to recognize the ambiguity in Dickens's text and to see moments of tenderness, attractiveness, and comedy in what is mostly a repulsive, racist caricature."

Renderings of Fagin have remained controversial. Understandable, then, that the Audible production wanted to circumvent all this. (Bart would have sympathized.)

Interesting. All very interesting.