In June 1857, Hans Christian Andersen arrived at Gad's Hill, the country home of Charles Dickens, about 30 miles from London. Unfortunately for the beloved Danish writer, what was to have been, for him at least, a chance to bask in the aura of one of his literary idols instead becomes a painfully awkward and overlong interlude for both men and the Dickens family. In Five Weeks in the Country, Francine Prose (The Vixen) has brilliantly imagined this encounter between two giants of 19th-century literature in a story of friendship, professional ambition, and domestic conflict.
From Prose's description, Andersen would have been a trying houseguest for any length of time. That fact only becomes clearer as the days of his visit stretch into weeks. For one, he's a bundle of phobias, among them dogs (the Dickenses have two large ones) and the fear that a returning comet will strike the earth. For another, he's a hypochondriac who has a habit of passing out at emotionally stressful moments. Worst of all, he finds himself "hopelessly mute in the presence of the great man," whenever he attempts to utter any intelligible English around Dickens. One of Andersen's few saving graces is that the youngest of the family's nine children--known only as "Baby"--becomes enamored of the bedtime stories he reads to him each night.
The imperious Dickens writes incessantly, both to earn the money to sustain his large household and to satisfy an adoring body of readers, while Andersen is afflicted with a catastrophic case of writer's block. A highlight of this well-drawn portrait of the burdens of artistic fame is the household's simmering tension as the arranged marriage of more than two decades between Dickens and his wife, Catherine, crumbles under the demands of parenting a brood, now ranging in age from five to 20, and the writer's persistent flirtations with other women.
Prose skillfully relies on a Rashomon-like structure to describe Andersen's disastrous visit from three perspectives. The first is a collective account by the Dickens children, the second a third-person narrative from Dickens's point of view, while the last is an often deeply moving version in Andersen's voice. Prose's subtle withholding of key details and the pleasure of seeing the same events recalled with slightly different shadings keep the necessary repetition fresh.
Five Weeks in the Country concludes with a lovely coda that deftly knits together several of the novel's plot strands. Anyone who has cherished the work of these literary masters will delight in Francine Prose's ability to bring them to life on the page in a novel that's the next best thing to reading their work. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Francine Prose vividly imagines a real-life encounter between two 19th-century literary giants.