Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

 

It is hardly surprising to see this on a list of great books, as it is often considered Dickens’ best. Out of the Dickens novels I have read, it is certainly the one I enjoyed the most and found the easiest to read. This is perhaps why it maintains its place as a set text studied in many schools and universities. The novel is another coming of age story that follows its narrator, Pip, from his humble beginnings in rural England, to the city of London.

 

As a young boy, he lives with his sister and her husband, Joe, a blacksmith, in the Kent marshes. One night he comes across an escaped convict and ends up helping him escape further. Pip is later taken to the house of Miss Havisham, a wealthy and eccentric old woman, once left at the altar, who continues to wear her wedding dress and live in the decaying grandeur of the wedding that never happened. Here he meets the young girl, Estella, and becomes infatuated with her.

 

Pip’s identity centres on his ‘expectations’; dissatisfied with the ordinary countryside existence as a blacksmith, and hoping for a miraculous transformation, he feels a sense of sadness, ingratitude and shame in his home and the possibilities it allows for his future. Instead he holds the provincial dream of moving to the fantastic city, to make his fortune and impress Estella. This dream seems to be actualised when he meets the lawyer, Jaggers, who provides him with the news of a mysterious benefactor and a fortune: “My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality”.

 

Dickens sets him up for a disappointing fall. Pip’s first impressions are that the city is “rather ugly, crooked, narrow and dirty”, with imposing buildings, illicit activity and where religion and justice have become corrupt. Later he concludes that “London was decidedly overrated”. It is dramatically brought down from an ideal to an awkward unattractive reality. Furthermore, the glamorous model of the century, the movement from backwardness and deficiency in the country to riches and success in the city, is satirised as it is equated with criminality; it is only possible for Pip due to criminal funding (Magwitch, the convict Pip once helped, turns out to be his secret sponsor).

 

Time seems sped-up in the city – the fast-paced living and working is contrasted with the slower movement and changing seasons of the countryside, which is again different to Miss Havisham’s immobility, “as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place”. She does not move on, living in the moment of her crushed dreams and expectations, unlike Pip who is continually involved in the process of encountering the world for what it really is.

 

The story continues with a fire, several deaths and another escape. Pip feels tainted by London’s crime and grime and having shown disdain for his old life and friends (though he continues to uphold Estella and see her everywhere: “You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here”), Joe is still the one who comes to his aid when Pip falls ill. In the end it is the country mists and “tranquil light”, rather than the city’s supposed glamour, that seem to offer hope for his and Estella’s relationship. Dickens shows us one of life’s ironies: fulfilment often comes when we least expect it.

 

The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

 

This best-seller is the story of 14-year-old Susie who is raped and murdered by her own neighbour and narrates the aftermath from heaven, where she remains fixed on the world and the people she knew and loved. It is both haunting and uplifting, revealing the connections that come about even in such tragic circumstances.

 

The novel closely follows Susie’s family as they struggle to come to terms with her death as well as honour her memory. Susie traps herself in a waiting place in heaven, between this world and the next, unable to move on whilst preoccupied with earth. Her father attempts to find evidence to bring to justice her killer, a man from their neighbourhood, “My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer”, while her mother seeks an escape. The person who seems most in touch with Susie and with all women who have suffered, is Ruth, her solitary classmate, whose body Susie’s ghost briefly inhabits (I have to admit this is the only part of the story that I thought took the presence of the dead a little too far). The Lovely Bones also details Ruth’s journey, and that of Ray Singh, the bestower of Susie’s first kiss.

 

The bones are Susie’s broken bones that Mr Harvey hides in his cellar before dumping, the skeletons in the closets of seemingly immaculate suburbia, but they are also the “the lovely bones that had grown around my absence [...] The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future”. The novel challenges our perceptions of time, whilst staying true to the old cliché ‘time heals’, allowing Lindsey to leave her sister “in her memories, where [she] was meant to be”.

 

Susie’s Heaven is not a religious paradise, nor is it associated with perfect peace and freedom from earthly desire, at least not yet. It is where “life is a perpetual yesterday” and where Susie continues to grow up and change. Both the dead and the living must learn to let go in order to free themselves and those they love.

 

It is a compelling read and deserves the success it received. Sebold writes, as Susie, in a way that is simple and beautiful, blunt and sensitive, creative and realistic, all at the same time. It is a novel that you are not likely to forget in a hurry. 

 

 

Esther Cheesman