The Likeability Factor

Pip is a complex character. He's not easy to like. They say gratitude is the least of virtues, ingratitude, the worst of vices. And his ingratitude, coupled with his grandiosity, makes him doubly horrendous.

But, I guess you can admire his candour. This book is a remembrance of things past. It is emotion recollected in tranquility. He sees his mistakes, he takes care to point them out.

And there is quite a bit of humour here.

Anyway, whatever it is, it's not boring. When I read, I get engrossed and I think I will be done before this week is through.

I'm halfway through the book now. Pip has left Joe, Biddy and his sister and moved to London where he is being tutored by Matthew Pocket, a relation of Miss Havisham. By the bye, I can understand why Miss Havisham is the most studied character in the book. That chapter where she is introduced is the most compelling in the book. And Pip's description of her room, her wedding cake, her wedding dress...(I wonder how all this smelt). You could go over it again, and again, and again and learn something new on each re-reading. Maybe this is why Great Expectations is one of the most re-read books of the Dickens' cannon.

Anyway, will say more when I get through with the book.

Great Expectations

So yesterday, I finally finished The Uncommercial Traveller. No, it didn't take that long to read, it just kept not holding my attention and although I was supposed to have been done ages ago, well, I wasn't. There was still some good bits right through to the end, but well, it was interspersed with bits I skimmed over, didn't really read or register. I'm sorry, but when he's preachy or trying to be too clever, I just get bored.

The good news is, the moment I clicked out of Uncommercial Traveller and ran through the selection of his books I have yet to read, I decided on (as you probably guessed from the title of this post), Great Expectations.

I thought I'd just read the beginning, you know, the bit everyone knows, where Pip is standing at the churchyard, admiring his parents' and brothers' graves (a row of little lozenges) and starting to cry when the convict caught him and terrified the bejeezus out of the little dude (incidentally, this particular passage is gone through in great detail in Robert Olen Butler's "From Where You Dream" book on writing) when I found I couldn't put it down.

I read the first 50 pages (the last time I read Great Expectations was nearly 20 years ago) so I didn't remember most of the story. I remember that Joe was nice and that Pip's red-faced sister who was "bringing him up by hand" was not, and that Pip hated (OK, there is no softer word for it, though for a child to use that word at that age would have been considered 'wicked' so he uses a lot of other words instead, but it comes to the same thing).

So I read about Pip stealing the food and Joe's file for the convict, getting it out to him, being terrified at lunch in case his sister discover the loss and know it was him, the chase given by the soldiers to recapture the convicts, the fact that the convicts were supposed to be on a ship called The Hulk...Pip learning to write and trying to teach Joe, Joe, only knowing the two letters J and O...his learning had been impeded by his father's drinking...

It was way past midnight and young Arnold, whom I'd been cuddling, disengaged himself and went to settle himself on the sofa. The light was bothering him. Before that he had been sleeping against the front door, a sure fire sign that he wanted to go out and, engrossed in my new book, I had ignored him.

So I opened the front door, that worthy made his way off the sofa (no, he shouldn't have been on there in the first place) and staggered out. I sat on the neighbour's culvert, swatted mosquitoes, and read on. The iPad is about the only thing it is comfortable to read under the street lamps. The road was wet.

One of the neighbour's seemed to be having a party. The house was shuttered, there were no cars parked haphazard all over the road, as there are when the others have a party, but loud voices and loud laughter issued from it.

Arnold stopped for a bit, uncertain, and looked in the direction of the noise. Then he took off, and I sat on the sloping culvert and read on, looking up every so often to see if he were coming back. It was late, I was tired, but that's how engrossing the book was. I laughed out loud at the sight of Pip's little letter, all misspelled, which Joe was so inordinately proud of.

And then I heard the patter of little feet and my little black dog emerged from the darkness, running towards home, mouth open, tongue hanging out, a loose doggie smile playing upon his lips. He aimed straight for the gate, so I went in after him, shut it, locked up the house, and then he headed straight for his bed.

I locked the door, put away the iPad and went to sleep. I was supposed to have taken off early in the morning for JB. Instead, I slept in a little (a lot) longer and took off late.

I have a feeling it's not going to take me so long to read Great Expectations. The story is riveting from the word "go". I can't wait to see what happens next. Which is what I've found with all his novels, but not so much his non-fiction.

But maybe that's just me.

A real Dickens connoisseur would appreciate it all, down to the last letter.

The Uncommercial Traveller

Sigh, I am about 50 pages away from the end of the Uncommercial Traveller and I do so wish it was over already. Although there were spots of brightness (like when Dickens reminisces about his childhood and becomes amusing and charmingly absurd (just read the chapter on medicine men, where he describes how ridiculous a funeral procession actually is) or when he talked about lawyer's chambers, a theme, if you would remember, in Pickwick, a lot of it drags.

He is at his preachy worst here.

I was thinking of how much I loved Virginia Woolf's essays (even more so than her fiction which takes some getting into, not being the most accessible stuff in the world) and how for the most part I love Dickens's fiction and hate his essays or articles.

I keep doggedly on, reading about 100 pages on my little iPad a day, until yesterday, when I should have finished, but could not, simply could not, face it.

So today, instead of reading it on the iPad, I tried for a spell on my laptop, downloading the Penn State PDF version, and oh my, I read two stories, or rather one a half and how it dragged, until finally, I X-ed out of the window, without bothering to finish. It will keep till tomorrow.

And so will I, as I drag my weary footsteps through the last pages of this book, happily to close it once and for all, and never to revisit it.

Funny to think that the Uncommercial Traveller actually inspired that theatre exercise which they took around the world. Which means other people obviously liked it a whole lot better than me.

But to be fair, that exercise was based on only one chapter of the book, the chapter where Dickens has insomnia and goes wandering through the streets of London at night, when everything has taken on an unfamiliar hue and you wander and wander, hoping for a light in the window, hoping that someone else is up late keeping a vigil, so you feel companioned.

But, as I said.

That was only one chapter.

I'm feeling very tired these days. A weariness that has settled in my bones. I go through the motions, but it's like part of me is off somewhere (like Dickens wandering the night streets) not really interested in what's happening around me, not really interested in what I am doing, not really caring about anyone around me.

Compassion fatigue?

Or just fatigue?

The other day, I was driving, and suddenly I remembered an episode from The Waltons (I think it was the first episode, Season One where a little deaf girl is left on the doorstep and the Waltons take her in) and something about the scene brought tears to my eyes.

Strange. Real life fails to move me.

A vestige of memory of fiction does.

For a heart rending second I think I am going to burst into sobs and I control the heavy exhalations. Allow the tears to course freely from my eyes, but trying desperately not to scrunch up my face into its mask of misery so that all the cars around can see what I'm doing.

It's the idea of family that makes me cry.

While in real life, it leaves me cold, hollow, lifeless, anger calcified into quartz.

Of such absurdities is life made...and Dickens, in his own voice, fails to move, but I will journey on to the end, and will not mark the ending by any new words (because I don't want to) and will move on to the next book in my list, wending my weary way home.