I quite enjoyed Great Expectations, and Miss Havisham was quite a disturbing character. This book by Ronald Frame presents itself as the prequel to Great Expectations.
Here's an extract from a review:
The greatest difficulty with Havisham, however, lies at the very heart of the endeavour. Frame seeks to recast Miss Havisham as a woman of flesh and blood, driven mad by heartbreak, but that is to miss the point of Dickens's creation. Miss Havisham is not an elusive ghost like Brontë's Bertha but nor is she real, as Pip is real. She is an illusion of startling intensity, like the gods of fable or the witch in a fairy story. Trapped in her mausoleum of a house, the embodiment of disillusionment and bitterness, of a life wasted and anguish turned inside out, she derives her power from her otherness. By making a real person of her, Frame is obliged not only to scale her down to human size but to explain all the awkward logistical quibbles that Dickens imperiously overlooked. In so doing, he diminishes both her majestic inhumanity and her terrible pathos, and loosens her hold over our imaginations.
No comments:
Post a Comment