The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H.G. Parry

I had a sense then of being suspended between two worlds: the sane one in which I had fallen asleep, and Charley’s, reaching to pull me awake through the speaker of my phone.

I thought you were sticking to poetry lately. Those postmodern things that read like a dictionary mated with a Buddhist mantra and couldn’t possibly make any sense to anyone.” “There is not a poem on earth that doesn’t make any sense to anyone.” Even

I became very interested in how Uriah Heep was functioning as a scapegoat for middle-class anxieties in David Copperfield, and the means by which he’s constructed as a threat to the social order, and I was reading and thinking about him quite closely—” “And

He tied me to the radiator with those plastic ties that only pull one way. I’ve always hated those things. They’re just a smug reminder that sometimes life doesn’t allow a do-over.” I

Uriah Heep and Orlick from Great Expectations are both shadow versions of the main characters

What I mean is, phrases are important. That’s what I’m trying to teach my poetry students at the moment. Words are chosen very carefully. Stories are built from words.”

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,’”

Words on paper are quiet, and porous; in the right mood, I sink down between the gaps in the letters and they close over my head. Words

So I’ll be drifting in words, absorbing, and the words I absorb will be racing through my bloodstream. Every nerve, every neuron will be sparking and catching fire, and my heart will be quickening to carry it through faster, and my eyes will be tearing ahead to take in more and more. This isn’t magic yet, or whatever the word is. (It’s always annoyed me that I can’t find the word.) This is just reading a book.

And while I’m reading, the new words I’m taking in will connect to others already taken in. That reference to blue is the third this chapter, and it always goes with wealth. That phrase is from the poem earlier. Deeper. That’s a reference to the myth of Orpheus. That’s a pairing of two words that don’t usually go together. Wider. That’s a symbol Dickens employs often. That typifies Said’s writings on Orientalism. Points of light. They make a map, or a pattern, or a constellation. Formless, intricate, infinitely complex, and lovely. And then, at once, they’ll connect. They’ll meet, and explode. Of course. That’s the entire point. That’s how the story works, the way each sentence and metaphor and reference feeds into the other to illuminate something important. That explo...

“I thought you said everything in a book has meaning.” “It does! That doesn’t mean it means what you want it to mean!”

Today was my first day of high school, and it was not as expected. I thought people would want to learn in high school. Perhaps that was naive.

I just realized that The Invisible Man is a retelling of Plato’s ring of Gyges,

History is every bit as much of a story as fiction.

“It’s not complicated. It’s just the idea that every book has an implied reader—a sort of imaginary person the author has in mind while he’s writing. I

Call it an aesthetic observation; a place can suit a person aesthetically as well as a pair of trousers or a jacket. This street looks well on you.

“That’s the danger of stories,” Mum said. Lydia and I weren’t the only ones thinking about Charley, obviously. “They bring things into the world, and they can’t be put away again.”

with a book in front of him, his mind distances itself from his body.

It was a glorious mess, as all relationships were:

you know when you read a book, sometimes, and you suddenly realize that you’ve been missing something your whole life, and you weren’t even aware, and all at once you’ve found it and are just a little bit more whole?”

I said. “None of you are real. You’re the accidental products of too much emotional investment in fiction.” “As opposed to what, the accidental products of a biological act?” Millie said scathingly.

Sherlock Holmes stories glorify human intellect; his criminals are intellectual puzzles to be solved, not living breathing inhabitants of a world in their own right.

The only thing more tedious than someone else’s crises are one’s own. Did

Nothing stays hidden. Secrets are always found out, and the world is unforgiving.”

“As I recall,” Millie said, “in your book, your secret isn’t revealed until you stab your painting in the heart.” He shrugged. “That’s how all secrets are revealed, in the end. Either someone else betrays us, or we betray ourselves.”

“Books don’t hurt people.” “What comes out of them jolly well does.”

I don’t trust him to be right.” “So you trust his morals, but not his intellect?”

“I want to live in the world, unbound, following nobody’s plots but my own.”

What you need to understand about protagonists, Sutherland, is that we’re all busy with our own plots. We can’t help it; we’re not used to sharing our stories.

The implied author is the character a reader may attribute to an author based on the way a book is written. It might have nothing in common with the author as a real, historical person, or it might be very close—that’s completely irrelevant. What matters is what’s on the page.” “So that was the Dickens that we imagine when reading David Copperfield?” “I think so.

Uriah Heep is a scapegoat, so that David can achieve what Uriah wants to achieve without being dangerous himself. That’s how happy endings work. For there to be a restoration of order, there has to be a sacrifice.”

Let me try to warn you again. Knowledge is dangerous.

There are coincidences in life, not in books. Everything in a book is placed there for a reason. What’s the reason for this one?”

It’s not fair. It feels good to write it, even if it doesn’t change it. It’s not fair. It’s not fair it’s not fair it’s not fair it’s not FAIR. It’s. Not. Fair. I know that life isn’t. But stories are. Or if they’re not fair, they’re not fair with purpose. I wish I could tell better where stories end and life begins.

“you have seen, but you have not observed.”

Emotions are antagonistic to clear reasoning.”

“That’s not what Charley says,” I returned. I felt, illogically, that I was scoring a point. “He says that feelings are a mind picking up on things it doesn’t always understand.” “Perhaps. But if so, they are a poor substitute for true understanding.”

“We see what we know is there.

When he sees himself through your eyes, he reinterprets himself,

The truth here is rarely pure and never simple.”

There isn’t another way. I told you, it makes sense. Narrative sense. It’s how stories work. For order to be restored, there needs to be a sacrifice.”

I don’t care what everyone says, damaging books is worse than damaging people. People heal up. Books never do. The marks always show.

We love Dickens because he tells us the truth, when the dominant strand of contemporary postmodern literature so often tells us that there is no truth. And there isn’t, perhaps, not that can be put in words. Truth, at least complete truth, isn’t held in words. But there would be no truth at all without them. It lies behind them and lurks around them and shines through them, in glimpses of metaphor, and connotation, and story.

“What we see when we look at people is just a bundle of our own interpretations,