So, new blog post, and finally, the beginning of a resolution I’ve had in mind for a while: to read a classic novel every month this year. Hopefully, this resolution will be so successful that I will just do it every year as a matter of course.
So, the first novel in this year’s series was loaned to me a long time ago by my brother (who never reads, so it came as something of a shock). It took me a while to get around to it, and it was actually the genesis of this resolution, something of a spur to get on with it by creating an occasion around it. And the novel in question is Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. I’ll confess to never having seen any of the many adaptations, though I knew the main character was Pip, and that it featured a Miss Havisham. That was the extent of my knowledge.
Cover: Great Expectations
The edition I read was the Penguin Classics edition, available here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Expectations-Penguin-Classics-Charles-Dickens/dp/0141439564/
My brother had warned me that it would take some time to get into the Victorian style in which Dickens wrote, but actually I found the contrary: I was immediately immersed in the sense of time and place that is conjured with the opening paragraphs. That wasn’t surprising to me, really, as Dickens was very much a writer of his own time, and his use of the local idiom to place the reader firmly in a geographical context as well as a chronological one was only to be expected.
What I hadn’t expected, though, was the sense of real jeopardy Pip is almost immediately placed in with his encounter in the marshes, which (as we come to realise) forms the central spur for all the action that follows thereafter. The characters are extremely accessible, none moreso than Pip himself, and one really feels an attachment to him with the revelation of his persecution by his sister. This early in the novel it’s clear that we are meant to identify with Pip, and cheer when his gradual betterment begins to occur.
It’s thus disappointing when Pip fails to live up to our expectations and treats Joe with such disdain as his station in life improves (though he has no idea why). Now my sympathies switched almost entirely to Joe, and with Pip’s removal to London almost hoped that he would suffer some reversal that would bring home to him the changes in himself. The latter part of the novel, with the revelations about Miss Havisham, Pip’s unknown benefactor, Estella, and Pip’s eventual return to Joe, was devoured rapidly, and the final scene was rather bleaker than I’d expected. (I noted with interest that Dickens’s original ending was even bleaker than this, changed at the suggestion of one Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose name has become such a byword for terrible beginnings.)
So, an excellent beginning to this series of classic novel reads. Next up will be Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
