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Chapter 5: In Search of a City
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Handful of Dust, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Communication Breakdown and the Loss of Meaning
Religion, Morality, and Tradition
Chance and Fate
Civilization vs. Barbarism
Summary
Analysis
Miraculously, Tony struggles through the jungle until he stumbles onto the remote ranch of Mr. Todd, an English-speaker. He arrives extremely ill, still hallucinating wildly and spewing about his fevered visions. Mr. Todd administers a foul-tasting concoction to Tony, who soon cries himself to sleep in a hammock. Slowly, Mr. Todd nurses him back to health, explaining the vast medicinal resources contained in the jungle for those who know how to use them. Tony learns that Mr. Todd’s mother was an Indian but his father was a missionary from Barbados, and that most of the Indians on this complex are Mr. Todd’s children. For this reason, and because he has a gun, they obey him.
Tony has somehow managed to stay alive. His chance arrival at the jungle ranch of an English speaker is almost as fantastical as if he had actually found the City. Just as the irritating presence of Winnie during his weekend with Milly turned out to save him from Brenda’s extortion scheme, it looks like Tony may once again have found salvation in the unlikeliest of places. Mr. Todd’s mention of his gun, however, strikes a note of menace in the situation in which Tony, barely alive and totally powerless, now finds himself.
Themes
They converse more as Tony’s strength recovers. Mr. Todd asks him if he believes in God, and Tony says he never really thought about it. Mr. Todd, who cannot read, shows Tony his complete collection of Dickens, which his father used to read to him. After his father’s death, Mr. Todd was read to by a Black English-speaker who passed through the area, whose grave is now on the property. Mr. Todd is very pleased that Tony can read, and he declares that Tony will read to him.
Mr. Todd adores Dickens, finding an inexhaustible well of delight in the novels even after hearing all of them read several times, and Tony at first enjoys reading Dickens’s works to him. The activity reminds him of how he would read aloud to Brenda in the first year of their marriage, until Brenda finally blurted out that she couldn’t stand it. Then, John Andrew became his captive audience. But the novelty of this new arrangement with Mr. Todd soon wears off, and Tony begins to detect a menace in Mr. Todd’s demeanor. Mr. Todd deflects about the possibility of Tony leaving, offering conflicting excuses: first, he says he must wait for the rains to raise the river to navigable height; then when the rains come, he says the Indians will not build boats during the rainy season out of superstition.
The complete set of Charles Dickens, the ultimate symbol of sentimental English culture, makes Tony’s encounter with Mr. Todd’s ranch even more poetic and ironic. Modern England disappointed Tony by not living up to his sappy Dickensian conception of it—and as in Brenda’s case, rejecting his boorish imposition of this fantasy. He flees his disenchanted homeland in search of a lost City, but here in the Amazon, he finds rather the foundational textbook for that fantasy. Meanwhile, Mr. Todd’s ominous behavior begins to curdle the sentimental evocation of Dickens’s world.
Themes
After months of reading, Tony tries to sneak off and enlist the nearby Indians’ help, but they merely relay his attempt to Mr. Todd, whose threats that Tony must continue reading now become more explicit. One day, in one of the Dickens novels from which he reads, Tony finds a note written by the Black English-speaker previously on the ranch: it is a promise to release him after he finishes reading aloud the book the note was found in, signed with an X by Mr. Todd. And yet, the man died on the premises. Tony’s dread now becomes acute. Mr. Todd tells him he may leave anytime he likes, knowing perfectly well that Tony is powerless to do so without his help.
The discovery of the note from the previous visitor confirms Tony’s fear that Mr. Todd has no intention of releasing him. Dickens’s works now transform from a lifeline to Tony’s sorely missed English culture to a prison ensuring that he will not return to it, barring some radical change in circumstances. Tony’s situation is terrifying but inherently humorous: Mr. Todd is like a child demanding another bedtime story, but instead he is the sole, armed ruler of an impossibly remote jungle ranch, with Tony utterly at his mercy.
Themes
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Eventually, a wayward stranger passes through the ranch, whom Tony manages to entrust with a piece of paper with his name on it before Mr. Todd shoos the man off. One night, Mr. Todd tricks Tony into drinking an intoxicating brew at an uncharacteristic village feast, which causes him to sleep for two days. When he awakes, Mr. Todd explains that while he was unconscious, an English search party arrived looking for Tony, for whom a reward is being offered in England. Mr. Todd sent them away with evidence that convinced them of Tony’s death. He now insists that Tony continue reading Dickens aloud.
Yet again, Tony seems poised to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, with the miraculous appearance of the stranger. But, again, his fortunes turn for the worse, definitively this time, in a missed connection all the more pointedly cruel for being so close to actually seeing him rescued. With emissaries to England now bearing news of Tony’s death, his hope of contact to the outside world is dashed forever.
Themes
