Leon Garfield has been hailed as one of the best contemporary writers for adolescents for his lively and unmistakable style, his ability to weave a series of endlessly fascinating plots, and for his quirky and unforgettable characters. He draws richly and with originality from our great masters of fiction: Fielding, Smollett, and Dickens. His debt to Fielding and Smollett is most obvious in terms of the settings of his novels, all of which take place in the 18th century. Many of them make use of the picaresque episodic structure and the complex combination of comedy and violence found in those early works. Encounters with all kinds of rogues, kidnappings, attempted and actual murders are not unusual in a Garfield novel. In fact, his own particular use of the adventure story, varied and expansive as it is, involves exploring and indulging in melodrama, which allows, of course, for suspenseful plots and characters that undergo extreme states of feeling.
But while any Garfield novel uses all the conventional melodramatic devices, his sense of humor tempers, refines, and adds complexity, so his novels don't feel corny or staged. Like Fielding, Garfield seems to embrace humanity in all its pettiness and smugness, and is appreciative of man's ingenuity. He is interested in exploring what we do to survive—and how, in the direst of circumstances, we are often deprived of the luxury of being moral, upright, and clean. While Garfield takes us through slums, onto pirate ships, into prisons, his touch is always lightened by humor, and therein lies his chief debt to Dickens. It is obvious that at least two of his novels draw their style and format from Dickens' work. Smith is as much like Oliver Twist and Prisoners of September like A Tale of Two Cities as they could be without being actual copies or parodies of those earlier works. But chiefly Dickens' pervasive comic sense of character is what Garfield borrows and makes his own. His characters explode with idiosyncratic verbal tics and gestures, which become their signatures, though the characters rarely lose their complexity.
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