The Real Hero

The devil has all the best lines. That's Atwood's law of fiction, and Sydney Carton is her proof: the wreck who owns the book while the gentleman stands around being good. The surprise of this episode is how modern her reading is. She sees in Carton a study of addiction written a century before anyone had the vocabulary for it, and in his famous confession scene not a romance but a load-bearing wall: the scene that must fail, she argues, or the ending never happens. There is also a deathbed vow here that the book has not finished with.