Friday, December 22, 2006

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

This is the wonderfully written (what could you expect?) story of Pip and the events in his life that lead him from a proletarian life in Victorian London to being an educated, upper-class gentleman. It's sad, it's funny and it's witty.

At times it's very dark, but not in the same way a Gothic novel, like Wuthering Heights or The Picture of Dorian Grey, would be. I'd say this book is a wonderful collage of pieces which at the same time constrast with one another and come together in harmonious fashion. It is a linear narrative, but one in which each character adds a different colour of his or her own to a final result that is a depiction of many different facets of the human condition.

The characters are pumped full of life and as solid as letters on paper can make them. It shouldn't be surprising that it became one of my all-time favourites.

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