Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (Book Review)

 

Great Expectations 

By Charles Dickens
Published by Penguin Classics, 2003
Price: $11

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away kids weren't as dumb as they are now. In school, you read actual CLASSICS instead of now standard woke vanilla literature that is "safe" for everyone. I read an abridged version of Great Expectations in the 12th grade. It was actually IN our literature book. Not in an honors course, but the standard regular class that ALL 12th graders took. I had been feeling a bit nostalgic for those days and decided that I wanted to reread the novel. I remembered bits and pieces of the book, the overall plot, but not a lot of the particulars. 

The main character, Pip, is just a young kid when the book starts, visiting the grave of his dead parents. While there, he encounters an escaped convict that will have a profound effect upon his life, though he doesn't know it at the time. He has been raised by his 20 years older sister and her husband, Joe, a blacksmith.

Pip's path is to apprentice with Joe and follow him into that that profession. But his aspirations begin to change when a rich weirdo woman named Ms. Havisham invites Pip to come "play" at her house. If that had happened in 2021, Havisham would immediately have been suspected as some kind of Michael Jackson pedophile. It's really not a completely far away comparison. Ms. Havisham's house is frozen in time because of a broken heart. All the clocks stopped at the same time, she still wears her wedding dress from twenty years prior. Even her wedding CAKE still sits on the table, covered by spider webs, bugs, and rats! 

It's also at the house that Pip meets Estella, Havisham's ward, whose beauty is only matched by her coldness, and Pip is instantly smitten. Estella looks down on Pip's lowly blacksmith future, inspiring Pip to become a "gentleman" so he can win her heart! Strangely enough, soon after that, Pip is contacted by a mysterious benefactor whose sole aim is to make his dreams come true! 

I have to admit I am a late admirer of Dickens. I had read David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and even this book in the past and was pretty meh about the author. But in the past year or so I have read Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, and then a reread of this book and I'm pretty much a huge fan now and want to read all his works. 

 The blurb on the back of this book calls Great Expectations a "haunting late novel". Why haunting? I guess because it does have a sort of gothic supernatural tinge to it, bordering on horror at some points. Ms. Havisham is scary what with her haunted house and suspension in time, all her windows shuttered from sunlight. It made me respect Pip all the more that he was brave enough to interact and even "befriend" such a ghostlike apparition. Even Estella, the great beauty, reminds me of the robot from Ex Machina, who seemed to have human emotions but in the end was a purely reptilian entity. 

And then there's Pip's encounter with an escaped convict at the beginning of the novel in a disquieting graveyard where he is threatened with a horrible death if he does not bring food and drink.  

Another reason it might be called haunting is because the story lingers in your thoughts long after you finish reading it. Mainly, because it has a Shakespearean humanity to it. Yes, this is what humans do. They do stupid things in order to obtain the affections of someone they love, even though their purpose is completely doomed. They do good AND bad things. Pip disassociates with his former friends and family once he becomes a gentleman because he finds them embarrassing, but he also helps set up one of his friends in a good career situation. He does the good deed anonymously purely out of altruistic motives. That's why I compare Dickens to Shakespeare. He is talented enough that he can show the full breadth of human experience, which only the masters ever accomplish. 

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about Jimi Hendrix's guitar playing. I marvel at Hendrix because he never seems to run out of a musical idea. He only puts the guitar down at some point or stops playing. No matter when he starts again, it just seemed like his playing was merely on pause, even when he begins a complete different song. It just flows out of him. I feel the same way about Dickens. His storytelling seems almost effortless. I don't get the feeling that he ever had writer's block. His plots seem so original even though they are pretty simple. Each book he writes contains a universe. Even the minor characters seem to be alive and make a statement even if they appear even in just a couple of lines. 

Great novel. 

My Grade: A+