The Finale

Margaret Atwood ends her talk-through of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities by gathering what Dickens gathers: resurrection and redemption in Dr. Manette and Sydney Carton, sacrifice in both its noble and its bloody forms, the line between justice and vengeance, and doubles everywhere, sometimes triples. She also enters two quibbles. We never learn who smuggled Manette out of the Bastille, and chloroform, familiar to Dickens's 1859 readers, hadn't been invented in 1783.

Her sharpest note is on the fight between Madame Defarge and Miss Pross, which she counts as one of only two woman-on-woman physical combat scenes in 19th-century English literature that she can think of, the other coming much later in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. On Carton's famous last words, she reminds you that Dickens could give him that optimistic speech because Dickens already knew what was going to happen. She doesn't, so her send-off is more guarded: hope for the best, prepare for the opposite, and keep your head on your shoulders.