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.