If you Google for modern fiction retellings of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the only text that credibly pops up is a 2000 Soho Press title by Susanne Alleyn called A Far Better Rest. The book centres Mr. Sydney Carton and focuses on his personal backstory, as well as the “missing years” after Lucie Manette’s wedding to Charles Darnay, until he reappears in Paris for the tragic denouement. It’s not surprising that Alleyn chose Carton as her protagonist— though Madam Defarge is certainly a worthy antagonist, he’s the only truly intriguing (and, I’d argue, three-dimensional) character in the original Charles Dickens cast, and not for the glaringly obvious reason.
H. G. Parry is clearly of the same mind as Alleyn, but adds fairies. The New Zealand-based author of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heap (2019), The Magician’s Daughter (2023), The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door (2024), and others brings a fantastical bent to her latest novel, A Far Better Thing. In the original, things simply are a certain way, including the coincidences and interconnectedness, without any backstory. With her retelling, Parry offers up her own answers for questions such as why Sydney and Charles appear to be doppelgangers, why Sydney feels such a pull towards Lucie, and even why Sydney hates himself so much.
Parry’s Sydney Carton was stolen by the fairies as a child, and as an adult given the choice between becoming a fairy himself, which entails losing everything that made him human (his memories included), or becoming a lifelong mortal servant of the Fairy Realm. The changeling left in his stead in the human world is a certain Charles Darnay. What’s more, Lucie Manette is the changeling for Carton’s best friend in the Fairy Realm. Ivy tragically lost her life on the night before his birthday, while she and Sydney were trying to escape the difficult choice presented to every stolen child at the age of thirteen. That was the last time Sydney was in the Realm, having chosen mortal service over losing the memories he has of Ivy, as painful as they now are.
Having Sydney be the narrative’s sole point of view does mean that the other characters can appear a bit distant at times and aren’t given as much page or development time (though the supporting cast, when they do get a chance to shine and show their personalities, are well-defined enough to hold their own). But Parry’s version of Carton is such a fantastic example of a lost, not always likeable, yet infinitely compelling character—one who doesn’t yet see how much he has to offer—that this story couldn’t have been told any other way. Sydney carries this novel on his capable shoulders all the way to the heartbreaking, unavoidable end.
This Carton is still the deeply self-loathing, drunken, cynical, broken person we know from Dickens’s original, but with the backstory Parry has given him, and with everything he has suffered and continues to, we can better understand why this is so. By framing many of his actions as “the chance, in a lifetime of enforced servitude, to do something of (his) own free will,” Parry has succeeded in making him an even more captivating protagonist.
The chapters in this book actually have names rather than a generic numbering, an increasingly rare practice that immediately adds whimsy and a vintage feel to these early proceedings. The opening chapter is titled “In Which I Meet My Changeling,” and as it commences, Sydney Carton waits outside a graveyard on the edge of London in the early hours of the morning. Jerry Cruncher, who moonlights as a resurrectionist, is supposed to meet him to hand over a human bone that Sydney can then pass along to one of the fairies who will no doubt visit him later.
Of course, Carton is also a lawyer by day. At this point, as a junior advocate he is required to only prepare the questions and not interact with any of the clients, and so he isn’t yet aware that his superior, Mr. Stryver, is representing his changeling at the Old Bailey in a few hours. The first part of this opening chapter begins not with “[i]t was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” but with “[i]f you’re very fortunate, all a fairy will ask of you will be to steal a bone from a grave.” Yet it closes as follows:
It was the Year of Our Lord 1780. It was a cold, grey March morning; I was a cold, grey legal advocate, twenty-five years old and not yet dead. I feared this was the best of times; I hoped it could not get any worse.
Then follows the familiar first trial of Charles Darnay, accused by Englishman John Barsad of being a French spy. Among the witnesses are an elderly French physician and his young daughter, who journeyed over the Channel on the same ship as Darnay, and struck up a cordial acquaintance during the passage.
Sydney senses his changeling in the courtroom before he looks up to see him—“But he was me. Myself as I could have been.” All changelings are more beautiful than the human beings they substitute; that is one of the rules. Another, and one that is broken here (deliberately, as is soon unveiled), is that mortal servants are never meant to meet their changelings, or learn about who they once were. The fact that both Carton’s and Ivy’s changelings are in the same courtroom as him proves to Sydney that fairy interference is at play. Before the day is over, he will be visited by the fairy he hates the most—the one who killed Ivy and the one breaking all the rules, defying the mighty Fairy Court themselves—and realise that it is just the beginning of the turmoil that will surely follow. But why and to what end?
The fairies in A Far Better Thing are deliciously otherworldly: cold, casually cruel, cunning, mercurial, and utterly unconcerned about humans and human affairs beyond their utility. And yet, since the true fairies have died out and the newer generations are those kidnapped babies who grew up to make the choice to become a fairy, they are but one choice removed from mortals—and hence cannot directly impact anything to do with the humans or their world. This makes them dependent on those who choose instead to be mortal servants. You’d think they would treat their mortal servants better than other humans, given those servants are essential to their ability to influence the human world and the people in it. But the casual cruelty runs deep. For example, the fairies never place mortal servants in places where they could be loved, in a torturous reminder of what will always be unreachable for them, bound as they are for life.
The mortal realm is a plaything to the fairies. The French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, for instance, are of keen interest to one of their number, but only for the purpose of selfish gain. They are coolly willing to spur on more bloodshed for their own power-hungry ends. The one who goes by the name Shadow, meanwhile, has far more personal and longer-running ulterior motives that go way back, before either Sydney or Ivy were born. This means that Sydney’s simpler feelings towards Lucie in the original are here far more complicated: “a mixture of genuine tenderness, grief for Ivy, and longing for revenge against Shadow.”
Having this plot running alongside the human one heightens the intrigue and the stakes of a story that is for the first two-thirds of the book the ultimate slow burn. That said, there’s in truth no alongside: Both the human and the fairy plots are closely connected, entangled by forces known, shadowy, and unknown since the beginning—and that includes the Evremondes and the Defarges, even the Manettes. The fairy plot also informs many of Sydney’s actions. His past, coupled with the knowledge that his life is never his own—that there is no use fighting against even a singular fairy, much less the all-powerful unshakeable Fairy Realm—explains his most intimate motivations.
The themes of choice, of consent, and of chance occupy an important place in this story. Sydney despises himself for what he is willing to do to “stay in a world that has nothing for [him],” even stealing away babies for the fairies, as once he himself had been taken. He hates his vulnerabilities and wishes he could “be as pitiless and as powerful as the wind and fire because it hurts too much to be a human creature.” He hates his changeling but also knows him to be a brave and decent human being. He wants revenge against Shadow, the fairy who let Ivy die, but, when he visits Madam Defarge towards the end, he realises that he wants something else more.
In this telling, by sacrificing his life and saving Charles’s, Sydney Carton is not only doing right by Ivy (and her changeling Lucie), but also by himself. He is finally freeing himself, and thwarting the plans of a Realm and its fairies that have given him nothing but pain, all the while allowing his changeling—the person he might have been if not for the fae—the opportunity to fulfil their life’s potential, to “defy augury” with Lucie and their young family when he and Ivy couldn’t. Sydney knows that, even if he lets Charles die, he will never know happiness. He doesn’t want to die, but it’s the only way for his life to mean something on his own terms, and he realises this before the end—that he, himself, just exactly as he is, without any magic or Realm-silver, is enough when it matters the most. It’s a bittersweet understanding that fits the version of the character filled out by Parry, who has till then believed himself to be irredeemable. “Nothing more and nothing less than a memory” and yet everything.
In this one thing I was utterly free as I had never been in my entire life. In its very last moments, my life was my own, and I was giving it to the people I loved.
What’s more, at the end, Sydney reclaims his original identity from his changeling, dying as himself, the person he’d been born as:
I was Charles Evremonde again, as I was born. It has been a long, strange road back to myself, but I had made it in the end.
While thwarting the fae, Sydney also ensures that those after him will have a better chance at a real life than he and countless others ever got:
Wouldn’t it be strange if this, the last thing I will ever do, turns out to be the first spark of another revolution? [...] The last thing I will ever do. A strange thing, and a strange rest to go to afterwards. But perhaps it will be better than any I have ever known.
Even here, as in her treatment of the iconic beginning, Parry resists borrowing more from one of the most famous ending paragraphs of all time, and it is to her and the story’s credit and strength. For a story that isn’t Pride and Prejudice (1813) or Cinderella in terms of its retelling popularity, A Tale of Two Cities offers up exciting possibilities that could also feel daunting. A Far Better Thing wisely gives itself a larger playing field by adding the Fairy Realm to extend and build on the themes present in the original (Parry grasps the theme of duality, in particular, and really runs with it). Light and dark, brutality and mercy, changelings and their human counterparts, humans and fairies, individuals and society, London and Paris, even the multiple meanings of the title itself, all recur. Her original additions to changeling lore—hopelessness, hope, redemption, renewal, transformation on a personal and societal level— also add to the novel’s appeal.
A good retelling needs to balance respect for the original with its own authenticity. What makes this version so absorbing for me is the fact that, even if the original is the foundation of her vast canvas, Parry doesn’t use Dickens as a crutch or even as a copy-paste structure; she has her own narrative agenda, a story to tell, her own clear but at times lyrical and emotive language that doesn’t try to copy her predecessor’s wordy and complicated prose. And there is, of course, the seasoned execution which never falters. Parry deftly ties it all together, fairy and Dickens, in a devastating, brilliant, satisfying whole.