NO EXPECTATIONS

GREAT EXPECTATIONS
By Charles Dickens

Coming to a classic novel late is good thing. There was a time when Great Expectations would have been wasted on me. But at age 54, with a lot of books under my belt, I feel free to love this book in the way it should be. Reviewing it seems a little silly. What more can I say about a monument? Except, don’t treat it like a monument. Treat it like a book that was written by a man for an audience of adults, most of whom read it in a magazine, as it appeared in installments.

It is amazing to think of a serious novel about gratitude, but that is exactly what this is. It is possible to be too sophisticated to produce art, to be too concerned with intelligence and not enough with the emotions that make compelling narratives. I don’t believe that literature can improve us morally, but it can articulate what it is to be a human being. Gratitude, the prodigal son, forgiveness and repentance are all thought to be Christian ideals. But not in Dickens’ world. These psychological truths, the truth of our condition as human beings, of our obligations to each other, ourselves and to the truth, require no church or preacher. They do require a community of morally articulate individuals who act on their conscience. And Dickens is part of that community. In this story we see a Victorian man, a prominent author, reserve his greatest sympathies for a criminal condemned to execution. His horror is excited by the cruelty of child abuse and poverty, by bitterness, by fraud. But if he merely wove the tale of Pip out of moral sentiment it would be bad. Instead he tells a rip roaring story, and does so with great subtlety and beauty. I expect Dickens to be full of vivid characters. I was surprised by his descriptions of nature, of the marshes of Pip’s childhood, of the Thames as he and Herbert oar their scow downriver, and of the strange old brewery where Estella lives. I could not put this book down, even as I luxuriated in its sentences. I can think of no greater novel. It simply exists in a category of its own, an archetype from which other stories are struck.