Book Reviews

SIGNAL MAN | Charles Dickens | Short story

This book has crushed me, mentally and probably physically. I want to drop kick it down a flight of stairs and I desperately want to go back in time and kill Charles Dickens just so he didn’t make this book that holds the weight of my future in his cold unforgiving hands. This book makes my emotional stability gone and should have never been written. At least by Charles Dickens who writes like he’s the first person to ever write. Whoever read his work and said it made sense needs to be brought to an asylum and locked up forever. The Signal Man is not a good book. It is not my favourite book at least. Never in my life have I read something that seemed so confident in itself only to be the most rubbish piece of writing I have ever read. I could read all of Shakespeare’s plays and those would be so much easier to understand than whatever Charles Dickens decided to write that day. Maybe it is the difference between centuries, I’m sure someone would have understood what he was rambling about here back then. But I highly doubt that. I have nothing against Charles Dickens, it may seem like I do but I really don’t. His book A Christmas Carol was quite entertaining to read as for once he actually tried to make it readable for all classes. Unlike the Signal Man, the story was clear and the intentions it held were as bright as day. The Signal Man however, the plot is shrouded with such thick clouds that it guides you in the wrong direction and proceeds to surprise you by clearing up and exposing you to a place you weren’t originally going to. It’s not a nice surprise. The fact you have to read this story 5 times to at least make sense of what he’s writing shows this book is not as good as it seems. Adding words that only high intelects would understand doesn’t magically make it good but that’s what he did here. It felt forced everytime he came up with another word to not seem repetitive. I never have been so vocal about a book, I usually find what’s good about it but this one makes me want to load a gun and shoot myself after having a glass of Brandy. I don’t drink. I may not be the right target audience for him, that could be the issue. 

But there is one thing I do understand in this book is that the spirit (That I now come to loathe) is a danger signal and is warning the Signal man of the dangers that are to come in the future. However, the signal man doesn’t want anything to do with these signals as he feels powerless to do anything about it. He tells the narrator this, having a scared attitude while he does so. But even after explaining the circumstances and how coincidences of this size shouldn’t be as stated coincidences, the narrator, annoyingly so, suggests to him that it’s probably just his imagination and quietly suggests to him to see a doctor. The last time the Signal Man sees the spirit we know it is warning him of his timely death. But there’s another thing I have noticed. The spirit at the start did the movements and spoke exactly what the train worker did to get the Signal Man off the tracks. It makes me believe that the spirit was there for the Signal man all the time. But at the same time, this book makes me doubt everything I say about it to the point that I have no idea what to write about it. I have made many assumptions about this book such as, the spirit is the Signal Man’s spirit or the Narrator is the spirit. This is all due to certain sentences Charles Dickens has strategically placed in his book. If his objective was to thoroughly confuse the reader, he has achieved it. And if it was, I have a personal vendetta against him now. However, Charles Dickens' writing style truly shines in this book. He made the character’s feel almost real but at the same time completely fiction. The interaction between the Signal Man and the Narrator felt short but at the same time gave out a lot of information about the Signal Man without making it long winded. It explains that the Signal Man has other hobbies other than working the Signal Box at the point and even says how the Narrator felt about these ideals. 

In summing up I found it quite difficult to read and it took repeated attempts to gain an understanding, or at least what I thought was an understanding. I wasn’t expecting Dickens to be quite so hard to understand and a short story to be quite as complicated. It was interesting to me how I reacted to it as obviously at one point this must have been classed as a ghost story? I didn’t find it so and I enjoyed the interplay between the main characters even though I found them personally irritating. It could be that they, as characters, are a bit dated to modern tastes? We don’t really behave in the same way that they did anymore, a man working on the railway would probably no longer invite someone into his signal box. They would be more likely to pretend each other didn’t exist? I suppose that in Dickens' time things may have been much different than they are now. I like to think that at one time a man could wander up to a signal box and be invited in to sit by the fire and watch the trains go by. In some ways we may have improved as a society but at the cost of simple friendliness to strangers.