At Dickens World, I was lucky to be joined by the excellent art photographer Immo Klink, whose photos of the park and its workers turned out to be a perfect visual analogue for my experience.
And then there is this photo.
It was taken not by Immo Klink but by an automatic camera hidden deep in the fetid bowels of the Great Expectations boat ride, where it captured this magical moment: my friend Asad and me just after we plunged backward down a ramp and were hit by a giant splash. I’m the one who looks like he’s having a psychotic break. (Earlier in the ride, I lost my mind and started laughing like a madman.) Asad has a slight smile, but it should not be mistaken for a smile of joy — it’s a smile of sadness, confusion, defeat, resignation. He was extremely upset about getting his coat wet in January, in England, and I think he was also a little put off by my manic screeching, and at this point he really, really just wanted to get out of Dickens World. The photo doesn’t appear with my essay, but it is described in it as follows: “We looked like a perfectly Dickensian pair: me in a mania of wild-eyed laughter, my friend resigned and unhappy — comedy and tragedy side by side, ‘in as regular alternation,’ as Dickens put it in ‘Oliver Twist,’ ‘as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.’”
A few words about Asad, who appears in the essay only as a shadowy figure: my anonymous “friend.” In reality, he was a huge part of my trip: driver, companion, interpreter, guinea pig, canary in the coal mine. Asad and I met 10 years ago in grad school, where I found him to be so intimidatingly smart — so effortlessly fluent about esoteric subjects that I’d never even heard of — that I almost dropped out of the program after two weeks. I stuck with it, though, and eventually Asad and I became friends. He’s still the most naturally critical person I know — not in the narrow sense of being negative about things, but in the large and exciting sense of taking things apart, analyzing them, concocting theories. Walking around with him feels like carrying a philosopher in your pocket.
Because we studied Dickens together at school, and because Asad lives in London now, it seemed only natural for me to bully him into coming to Dickens World. He agreed and, true to form, kept up a brilliant running commentary about everything we saw.
In my favorite picture from the trip, Asad stands on top of a very high railing in order to peer ecstatically over the wall of Miss Havisham’s garden, still discoursing.
Asad was on fire, interpretively, for the entire trip. Only Dickens World, it turned out, could make his critical motor grind to a halt. As soon as we entered the park, it was like he’d been shot by an arrow. You could feel the energy draining out of him. I started writing down his comments in my notebook and, reading over them now, I can still feel the spirit departing his earthly form:
“This is the ultimate victory of film over literature.”
“This is awesome! This sucks!”
“It’s a set of impoverished televisions that cannot cut from one scene to another.”
“Soggy, dank, exploitative.”
“This is too horrible of a misapprehension of everything.”
“I just feel bad for everyone now.”
And that, in a nutshell, was our trip to Dickens World. God bless us one and all.