Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend
Our Mutual Friend is the last novel by Charles Dickens, and possibly his darkest. This book is found with Desmond Hume while he was in the hatch,and he intended it to be the last book he read before he died. Knowing the significance of the book, Penny Whidmore, the love of his life, placed a letter of her undying love in the book for Desmond to read while he was in military prison for failing to follow orders. However, he checked it into prison storage, so he never found it.

Desmond's Suicide
After over 35 days by himself in the hatch after killing Kelvin, the other Swan Station operator, Desmond began to find himself detached and lonely. At one point, Desmond grabbed the book in one hand, a gun in the other and thought about suicide. When he went to open the book Penny's letter saying that she will wait for him and to never give up, fell out. When he saw the letter, he heard pounding on the upper hatch. He turned on the light and saw a scared John Locke looking down still, and it gave him hope. He put down the book and gun. The light in return gave Locke hope.

Plot Summary
"The basic plot is vintage Dickens: an inheritance up for grabs, a murder, a rocky romance or two, plenty of skullduggery, and a host of unforgettable secondary characters. But in this final outing the author's heroes are more flawed, his villains more sympathetic, and the story as a whole more harrowing and less sentimental. The mood is set in the opening scene in which a riverman, Gaffer Hexam, and his daughter Lizzie troll the Thames searching for drowned men whose pockets Gaffer will rifle before turning the body over to the authorities. On this particular night Gaffer finds a corpse that is later identified as that of John Harmon, who was returning from abroad to claim a large fortune when he was apparently murdered and thrown into the river. 

''Harmon's death is the catalyst for everything else that happens in the novel. It seems the fortune was left to the young man on the condition that he marry a girl he'd never met, Bella Wilfer. His death, however, brings a new heir onto the scene, Nicodemus Boffin, the kind-hearted but low-born assistant to Harmon's father. Boffin and his wife adopt young Bella, who is determined to marry money, and also hire a mysterious young secretary, John Rokesmith, who takes an uncommon interest in their ward. Not content with just one plot, Dickens throws in a secondary love story featuring the riverman's daughter, Lizzie Hexam; a dissolute young upper-class lawyer, Eugene Wrayburn; and his rival, the headmaster Bradley Headstone. Dark as the novel is, Dickens is careful to leaven it with secondary characters who are as funny as they are menacing--blackmailing Silas Wegg and his accomplice Mr. Venus, the avaricious Lammles, and self-centered Charlie Hexam. Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens's most satisfying novels, and a fitting denouement to his prolific career. --Alix Wilber"''

-Amazon Review, 'http://www.amazon.com/Our-Mutual-Friend-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140434976

