![]() ![]() When I later became a writer, I found myself inspired by the novel all over again, quoting from it, stealing from it. It is the supreme coming-of-age novel, the best account of those years when we flee our childhood selves without any clear notion of where we're heading. Hardly wish-fulfilment, and yet I found the book, find it still, intensely moving. He is abused, tortured, mocked, he rejects the love of others and is in turn rejected, and although he is, finally, capable of courage, decency and wisdom, he never quite achieves happiness. It's clear why a young reader might aspire to be Elizabeth Bennet, but who would want to be Pip Pirrip? A singularly un-heroic hero, he's pretentious, pompous, ambitious, in love with the idea of being in love yet tediously masochistic, self-indulgent, self-pitying, all the -selfs except self-knowing. Yet if I saw myself in the book, it wasn't a particularly flattering portrait. By some miracle, a story written in the mid-1850s had captured much of how I felt in a small provincial town at the end of the 1970s. I first read it at 14 or so and, apart from some infatuations with Orwell, Fitzgerald, Salinger and Hardy, it has remained my favourite novel ever since. ![]() For some people it's Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, but for me it is Great Expectations. R ead a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life. ![]()
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