What a treat Great Expectations was for me! I am generally not a fan of heroes taken on a ride by circumstances and impulses they never even attempt to control, but when the storm is so perfect, so delightfully, magically perfect, who would complain?

Had I been English, or American, or a little less lucky, I would probably have read Great Expectations a lot younger, and would no doubt have had a great time of it, but would I have been able to enjoy the wonderful writing? Would have I made the difference between the social satire and the magical fairy tale undertones? I would have been happy with the mists, convicts and friendships; but would I have enjoyed Estella’s coldness and Pip’s ungratefulness?

The story itself sounds very XIXth century in the importance it gives to social structure: Pip, an orphan raised by his brutish aunt and his illiterate (if benevolent to the point of sainthood) uncle, comes into a sum of money of mysterious provenance. The money is to allow him a gentleman’s education. Everybody, Pip included, assumes that the money originates in the favor of a local old lady, Miss Havisham, a rich spinster driven to madness years ago by a broken engagement. The suspicion seems even stronger for the fact that the attorney in charge of the affair is also Miss Havisham’s; alas, Pip will later discover that the generosity is that of a convict he helped as a child. The dishonorable origin of the money, and the obligations it created for Pip will drive him away from society and from the young, cold-hearted pupil of Miss Havisham he is in love with, Estella.

While this, formally, could be the summary of the plot line, it missed all the important points of the book – in particular, its structure as a fairy tale and its formidable secondary characters. Pip is not a bad hero, far from it: he evolves through the novel, a rarity for the times, and has a complex character torn between selfishness and tenderness, intellectual aspirations and emotional ambitions, snobbery and simplicity… And yet I failed to find him compelling when compared to the lush cast of the book, most of whom forfeited some dose of realism to bask in the glory of unabashed whimsy: Miss Havisham, the witch who renounced the sun, forever clad in her torn bride’s dress, leaving among rot and spiders, casting spells and torturing her victims in an endless revenge; Estella, the barely seen and satisfactorily poorly explained temptress, the mysterious incarnation of her godmother’s sortileges, lovely and icy – the daughter of a gipsy and of a murderess, who seems to respond to violence more than to gentleness; Jaggers, the corrupt attorney of strong persuasion, with his fascination for evil and his compulsive hygiene, who eggs his victims on to evils; and many more, including the noble best friend, the gentle maiden, the double-faced adviser, the incarnated phantom of past guilt… Even Old Barley, the father of Herbert’s (Pip’s best friend) fiancée, who is described as no less than an ogre, was fascinating. And then there are the locations, the misty marshes of Pip’s childhood, the ruined domain of Miss Havisham, the dreary, sooty London of taverns and justice halls…

With so much thrown in, how could I begrudge Pip his lack of direction, especially when he makes up for it in honesty in the telling and a humorous voice? I even thought Dickens’s revised ending – with the young man finally tried getting the girl – was superior in poetry and a better fit to the rest of the book than the more modern, more realistic one, where Pip and Estella end alone and full of unspeakable regrets. “I saw no shadow of another parting from her“, concludes Dickens in this new version. Were I feeling facetious, I could argue that Dickens creates an ambiguous ending with this sentence – after all, Pip has not generally been the most lucid observer – but I prefer to take it with the same diffuse feeling of promise that the more traditional phrase, “and they lived happily ever after“.