BookBrowse Reviews Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein

BookBrowse:

An Oliver Twist adaptation that reclaims one of literature's most despised villains and gives him a family, an origin story, and a heart.

In Oliver Twist, young orphan Oliver bounces between harrowing living situations until he falls in with the wrong crowd, Fagin and his band of thieves, who send him with their associate Bill Sikes to rob a rich country home. Fagin and Sikes represent an immoral path for Oliver, a path from which he is eventually rescued by more upstanding characters.

In Allison Epstein's reimagining, Fagin is not the villain we've come to expect, who tempts and ensnares desperate young boys into a life of vice. Rather, having been in a similar situation himself at age sixteen, he offers impoverished, orphaned, otherwise abandoned children a chance at survival and a trade (never mind that the trade is thievery and pickpocketing). The items he teaches his boys to steal are small, easy to pawn—harmless.

Sikes, here, is not just a mere business associate, but a protégé to Fagin—his first and most infamous. Sikes takes Fagin's tactics further and is interested in bigger opportunities: housebreaking, violence. With an emotional thermometer ranging from peevishness to rage, Sikes is terrifying to everyone, including Fagin. In Fagin the Thief—which stands alone as an excellent novel, and doesn't require the reader to have read the original Oliver Twist—Oliver is just another lying, thieving youngster, one who seizes the opportunity to lie better and differently than the others. The real story is the complex relationship between Fagin and Sikes, who are mentor and protégé, debatably brothers, and arguably friends. No one quite knows which of these best describes their connection, least of all Fagin himself.

Told in four parts, Fagin the Thief covers how young Jacob Fagin (yes, Epstein gives him a first name!) falls into a life of pickpocketing; how he meets Sikes and takes him under his wing; how their relationship sours after a particular job they're meant to do together; and finally, how the life they've built all comes crashing down on them, as recounted in Dickens' original if sanctimonious version of events. Recognizable characters from Dickens—Charley Bates, the Artful Dodger, Bet and Nancy—are here, as are some new characters, including Ned Brooks, a black teenager who faces his own share of racism alongside the anti-Semitism directed at Fagin in Dickensian London; Fagin's mother; and Anthony Leftwich, the man who teaches Fagin the trade.

By giving Fagin a backstory, Allison Epstein reclaims the character from one-dimensional villainy. At sixteen years old, Fagin sets out into the uncaring, tumultuous streets of London after the death of his mother, Leah. Badly grieving, he makes a promise that he will not seek love or support beyond himself. Survival is his guiding principle. He's been trained as a pickpocket by Anthony Leftwich; with his small stature and quick thinking, his specialty is sneaky, light-fingered work. He excels at staying under the radar, seeking small profit, and doing whatever necessary to avoid trouble from the law.

Big, brash Bill Sikes, who cannot so much as brush a man's pocket without one feeling it, interprets Fagin's stealthiness as cowardice. With his size and his rage, Sikes' tactics involve tackling everything head on, and he soon feels there is more out there than petty pickpocketing. These differences in methods eventually cause the two men to grow apart and go their separate ways, though they remain in each other's spheres, partially due to their complicated relationship that extends beyond a business association.

Pivotal moments in Fagin's character development occur throughout the book, as he is offered opportunities to shed the image he has of himself—as selfish, weak, and unlovable—but is unable to do so. In Part One, which narrates Fagin's adolescence, Leah discovers that her young son has been learning to pickpocket and drags him to Newgate Prison to watch a public hanging, hoping to scare him off his current path. It is a turning point for Fagin, but not from his life of thievery—instead, he is unable to stay away. Later, when Sikes is caught housebreaking and seeks Fagin's protection, readers might recognize an opportunity for Fagin to give Sikes what neither of them has ever received before: love and support from an older male figure. But Fagin interprets his own desire to help Sikes as a personal weakness, counterproductive to survival, since Sikes attracts the type of attention that Fagin hopes to avoid. And he interprets Sikes' reaction to this rebuff as anger and violence, rather than understanding its true root: fear of being caught and hanged. Fagin, despite his seemingly charitable efforts to take in young orphans, continues to make choices that reinforce his own understanding of himself as a selfish, unlovable island of one. Epstein's Fagin is a complex, ambiguous man, whose motivations remain murky even to himself: indeed, whether he is taking in these boys out of compassion or out of self-interest is a source of internal debate in the book.

Other retellings of Oliver Twist have traditionally kept to the original portrayal of Fagin as a villain (see Beyond the Book). But by exploring how he becomes the character that he is in Oliver Twist, Epstein has crafted a fascinating figure, at the heart of whom is a question that readers will enjoy mulling over: Is he a sympathetic character, a selfish one, or both?

This review first ran in the March 26, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.