Book of the Week

Havisham by Ronald Frame 
Reviewed by Dr J Hudson 

Have you read Great Expectations? If you haven’t, you should. In fact, I would go so far as to say, you must. A fellow English teacher who has since joined the priesthood once remarked to me that every boy deserves to read Great Expectations, and I agree.

Our culture is informed by Charles Dickens’s monumental work: the New-Zealand writer Lloyd Jones uses it significantly in his Mr Pip; Australian novelist Peter Carey writes about one of its characters; the poet laureate has a poem about another; there is at least one opera inspired by it. Indeed, this review is arguably more about that great book than it is about this back-story piece by prize-winning novelist and dramatist, Ronald Frame.

The story of Philip Pirrip, known as Pip, growing up on the Essex marshes, coming to London and learning truths about himself and the world is one of the most powerful narratives in English Literature. Estella, the disdainful girl he first meets when he is ten years old, is the apogee of romantic yearning. And Miss Havisham, her guardian, is one of the most deeply-etched figures of terror I have encountered in a book.

I am not alone. This story and these characters, especially Miss Havisham herself, have entered the collective psyche, if not through the book itself then through the many film, stage and TV adaptations. Spoilers follow. Read Great Expectations!

Everyone knows (or thinks he knows) who Miss Havisham is. But Dickens gives us a limited amount of information about her background. She is the heir of a brewing fortune in a thinly-disguised version of Rochester, who lives in a decaying, once-grand house with the suggestive name, ‘Satis House’ – Latin, of course, for ‘enough’. Has the house seen enough suffering? Certainly, there is great anger, sorrow and misery living there, and bitterness, too. We are told what brought the owner, a spinster of uncertain years who appears still to be wearing the dress in which she never married, to such a pass: she was duped by a con man into parting with much of her fortune, only to be abandoned on the day of their wedding. But we are given nothing of the years before the incident that pushed her fragile psychological state over the edge.

This is what Ronald Frame seeks to do in his novel, written in 2012. For a start, he does what Dickens chose not to do and gives her a first name, Catherine, already making her seem more human. A lonely child, Catherine is separated by her father from her only friend, Sally, the daughter of a disabled worker in her father’s brewery. When she meets a plausible and handsome man named Compeyson she is offered her one chance of happiness. Frame brings Sally back into the story in a satisfying way, making social and political points appropriate for the period that still speak to today’s society. He has evidently done a great deal of research, too, and there are clever and inventive details of her upbringing and the things she does that make us feel this is a convincing portrait of such a girl at such a time. It is, appropriately, the world of Jane Austen, rather than that of the eminent Victorian.

His style, too, is nothing like that of Dickens. In place of the long, complex sentences of the Victorian novelist (don’t be put off – they’re wonderful!), we have brief, often staccato, bursts of poetic imagery, sometimes not perhaps as sharply delineated as they might be, creating what is more or less a series of static tableaux, not unlike the ones in which she engages as a young woman. This makes the book immensely easy to read – short, digestible and filmic – if not always as rooted in life as one would have liked. But that, I suspect, is Frame’s intention; the book is at times dream-like, and in this, it prepares us for the nightmare quality of the character in Dickens. Here, though, she has less fevered angst, more a lack of engagement, perhaps presaging the psychological disconnection that leads to her breakdown.

Frame takes us all the way into Dickens’s narrative, so that much of his book covers familiar territory. The thinking behind this is presumably that not everyone will know the full story. I think this is not necessarily the right decision, though, because it is impossible to compete with the masterful original and anyone’s endeavours will necessarily pale by comparison. I was not, furthermore, totally convinced that a seamless transition was forged between lonely, sad but essentially pleasant Catherine and the monstrous figure Pip meets in Great Expectations. Frame is reluctant to problematize her, wanting us to identify with her to the extent that she stays essentially a different person from the one we thought we knew. The Austen echoes don’t help here, being too naturalistic and sympathetic to accommodate the bold strokes of Dickens. Nevertheless, there is much to enjoy in this unusual and skilful addition to the Great Expectations corpus, especially in the earlier sections.

Final verdict: a brave stab and an easy, pleasant read but not a patch on Dickens. Read both, by all means, but read Great Expectations first. And again.