I read a bit of 'Middlemarch' last year (the same bit that most people probably manage before they subconsciously decide that life's too short – no that's unfair, it is brillaint, but can't it be released in fragments and delivered to my solitary confinement cell?) and it was really jarring to have this realist narrative with a narrator who constantly tells you exactly what they think of such and such a character and uses the events in the narrative as a springboard for various philosophical disquisitions