I am sufficiently familiar with Dickens' works that I understood most of what he put in Qunicunx, but one can understand a work of fiction without liking it, and one thing that I didn't like about Pallisser's characters was that they were like Dickens' characters to a large degree. But different people like different things in literature. There even are people who like Romance novels.
That's enough to destroy anyone from the outset. Actually, there are some people who grew up in Holyoke who are reasonably nice people.Oh and fun fact, Peter. Palliser has been a resident of the United Kingdom since age three, but he was born in our shared Commonwealth of Taxachusetts. I heard a rumor he was born in Lexington, but I guess it was actually Holyoke. No wonder he's so depressing.