You mustn't just barge in here saying you want to know, you know.

I have never read a Charles Dickens novel. Aside from a vague knowledge of the phrases he's contributed to the English language, and seeing Mickey's Christmas Carol, I have no knowledge of Mr. Dickens' work.

Six weeks ago, KQED, my local PBS station, ran an ad for Masterpiece Theatre's upcoming miniseries adaptation of Little Dorrit, written after Dickens was already rich and famous, but before Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. Little Dorrit, I was told, is one of Dickens' greatest love stories, and is especially relevant today: it revolves around the theme of chronic debt and even includes a shady banker.

So I tuned in, expecting, at the least, an entertaining way to spend my Sunday evenings. I won't give away what happens, but I will say that the story was almost as convoluted as one I wrote for a fiction writing class I took in college. When I explained just one part of it to a friend at work, I had to resort to diagrams to avoid confusing him. Little Dorrit is full of love triangles, love children, marriages of convenience, and family secrets. The caprice of the financial fates is on full display. In short, it's a soap opera, and I loved it. I anticipated Sunday nights as I never had.

In the end, though, it didn't all come together well. I have no idea what the point was of two of the characters. I had to resort to Google to check whether the two people who married at the end were related. (They weren't.) It reminded me exactly how much of a book cannot be adapted to the screen, no matter how long or ambitious the film version is. It also reminded me that when you try to change things, as the screenwriter did, you often make things worse or more confusing than necessary. When I looked up whether those two characters were related, I found a comparative explanation of the plots of both the book and the film. The book's plot was based on motivations and connections that made sense. The screenplay turned one connection into an amazing coincidence and left crucial questions unanswered.

(On a side note, I did find it a bit irritating that a man who is by no means thin rejected his former sweetheart in part because she had gained weight. Oh well, I suppose that casting a recognizable name (Matthew Macfadyen of Frost/Nixon and Pride and Prejudice) beat out logic.)

Despite all its flaws, the adaptation of Little Dorrit did inspire me to read a Dickens novel: Little Dorrit.