Little Dorrit...eventually

So I've started and am halfway through (at least I hope I'm halfway through) my next Dickens, Little Dorrit. Being in England as I update it makes it come alive for me. I know this is one of his more difficult novels to read (one uncle who had to do it for literature described it as painfully boring and my sister Jackie was not able to finish it).

I wondered why. I guess evil (and there is so much evil in this) is tedious. You're just skimming through it hoping to get to the part where he deals effectively with the villain, cutting them down in their not-so-prime. The thing I love most about Dickens is that he has a Sidneyesque sense of justice. Bad men who beat their wives die. (I'm hoping this remains true in this book because the bad man or men, are particularly noxious).

But ploughing through it, (sometimes excessive virtue and a refusal to blame or to see someone for what they are - Nell-Grandfather, Little Dorrit-Father - tires me. But I can see why Little Dorrit keeps making excuses for her weak and selfish father, sacrificing herself, denying herself to gratify his every whim so he can live in the Marshalsea Prison like a poor approximation of a lord. She worries about the whole family. And they, a product of their upbringing and surroundings, take it for granted and don't really care very much for her.

Other people see her for what she is though, and other people try to help her.

Arthur Clennam's former sweetheart Flora makes me laugh with her confusing speech, no commas, always hinting at something that doesn't exist anymore...pretending when there is no cause to. But it's her aunt, the woman with the glaring visage and vicious bark that makes me chortle so hard I spit out my soup.I think she is a creation of genius and to find a character like her (up there with the man in smalls who courted Mrs Nickleby over the fence, after throwing vegetable marrows at her head) is, well, a delightful surprise. I love it when she fixes Arthur Clenham with that glare.

And then comes out with something like:

"There are milestones on the way to Dover."

Which doesn't mean anything, but nobody seems to mind, except for Arthur, who is trying desperately to grasp what is behind the malevolence of these apparently unconnected, disjointed statements.

Ah me.

Well, I'll update again, when I have finished the book. And when I have, there will only be three more to go.

Methinks, it is possible that I'll be done with Dickens 2012, why, in 2012 itself.

And then I'll move on to Hardy.

And we went out of the ruined place...

OK I finished it. I thought I'd read about 100 iPad pages and then I kept reading and reading (because it gets tremendously exciting at the end and he slowly peels away the curtain to reveal more and more about the mysteries of the book).

I guess I started liking Pip when he first stopped thinking of himself and started thinking, well, first of Herbert, then of Magwitch...and I guess even if he abandoned Joe and Biddy, the consciousness of this abandonment was always there with him, like a prod.

Joe was as simple and selfless as Tom Pinch in Martin Chuzzlewit. And yet, he's a more finished character than Pinch. He had enough pride not to be patronised. But his goodness in coming to the rescue after Pip had abandoned him, and to never cast it up to him or demand gratitude or, when Pip at the end begged to be forgiven, to say there was nothing to forgive. People like him make you cry with their simple goodness. There is a quality of purity of heart, that is so rare, that when you meet characters like that, you pause, smile and want to be around them. The absence of malice is so refreshing, ice particles in your lungs.

Funnily enough, in reading this, I kept thinking of Angels in America. Maybe because, except for Roy Cohn, there was no real villain. I felt sorry for the guys who were supposed to be the villains...they were either weak or well meaning...Human beings are so complex. They are the very good and the very bad, but most people fall in between.

And Pip, who was so flawed, yet human, I started to like him when he warmed up to Magwitch, when he stayed with him through the trial, visited him, held his hand, read to him in jail, and eased his passing. That, to me, was even better, than how he served Herbert.

I think Pip became admirable. And the scene where he says goodbye to Estella, who remains cold and indifferent...the passion, wow, I think that was the best one in the book. I would copy it here. But I'm too lazy and it's nearly three in the morning and I'm tired.

I read somewhere that there were two endings. So after reading the ending in the little e-book (which I think was the second revised ending) I went online to look for the first one. I know the first one is preferred by the purists. And when I read this book all those years ago at 14 (understanding and appreciating so very little of it that I wonder I bothered) I read the original ending. I remember that little Pip had been with Pip and Estella kissed him, thinking he was Pip's child.

But I loved the second ending. The first, I thought, was too hard. Abrupt. The second was beautiful, sad, melancholy. It was open-ended and ambiguous. On the one hand, it could be read as if Pip and Estella finally got together. But it seemed more like a resolution of something outstanding, some hurt, some pain, some indifference, some bitterness. She had suffered much, it had tempered her proud spirit and now she understood what his heart had been. He had suffered much, it had tempered his spirit in turn, and he had never wavered in loving her.

By the bye, Pip's description of his hopeless love, how he had never been happy for one minute in her presence, but never wanted to be out of it, how he could see her for what she was, faults and all, but it didn't make the slightest bit of difference, that was what rang truest for me. I guess you can keep coming back to Great Expectations throughout your life (why had I only read it once?) and there would be something new to wring your heart.

Miss Havisham...she was vivid and frightening...the dreams discarded and decayed, the insistence on an exaggerated mourning which blighted not only her life but all those around, the conflagration consuming that tattered wedding dress and her flesh in the bargain, metaphor upon metaphor upon metaphor.

There were so many broken people in this book. And I guess you can see what a master Dickens is, because he gathers up their tatters and holds them all together. Broken as they are. There are others who try for this level of honesty or realism but who fail signally. You know they fail, because you lose interest in the characters, close the book halfway or find your attention wandering.

Not so with Great Expectations. Here, your attention is fixed on the page and you turn each breathlessly.

What a cast of characters. Joe and Biddy only come in at the beginning and the end, yet their spectres pervade young Pip's imaginings. He keeps them in a corner of his soul, and there is always the flavour of guilt in everything he does, thinks, feels...

I loved this book. And maybe after I'm done, I will come back to it.

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.