There have been a rash of Dickens biographies over the last decade (encouraging sales figs attached). But this is something slightly different. It is not a biography of Dickens' life, but a biography of his imagination - the characters, places and emotions conjured up across all his novels, letters, stories, public readings and diaries. It is a celebration, an examination and an exploration of the most powerful and potent imagination in literature. Peter Conrad, one of the great literary critics of our time, wants to reposition Dickens as a true god of literature - with the rarest ability to create worlds and corral a seemingly omnipotent imagination.
Like Dickens himself, Peter Conrad is both a creator and a conjuror. In the vein of Marina Warner and John Carey, The Enchanter is an intellectually rich and brilliantly readable work - both a bold discovery of Dickens' universe that both upends our ideas about literature and restores our faith in the power of imagination. Peter believes that Dickens alone rivals Shakespeare - and in many ways betters him. He charts how the forces of creation and destruction meet in Dickens, who was ultimately, in the unfinished murder mystery of Edwin Drood, destroyed by his own creative genius. This book is both a gift to those who already love Dickens and a key for those who have yet to read him.
'Peter Conrad is a dancer and acrobat whose brilliance, audacity and courage forever defy our ungenerous hopes of a pratfall. Nobody else can do what he does and get away with it.' (Independent)
'Conrad has published criticism so sharp you can cut your fingers on it.' (New York Observer)
'Conrad is stunningly well informed, compulsively allusive and equipped with the kind of imagination that transforms the base metal of history into pure gold' (Observer)
