The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkein

          The Hobbit was one of the first full-length novels I ever read, back in my childhood so many years ago. Back then I was hooked. Bilbo Baggins was a good protagonist, growing from just an un-ambitious Hobbit at the start of the story to a giant-spider killing hero about mid-way through. By the time I finished I was whole-heartedly in love with Tolkein’s fantasy world, though the sequel looked a little above my reading abilities at the time. With the prompting of Peter Jackson’s recent film, I have gone back to the original story and found myself a little underwhelmed.

          I knew what to expect, a simple children’s story with only a hint of Tolkein’s future developments, but I have to say the first few chapters were a bit disappointing even with this knowledge in mind. The story was dull and completely see-through; the Wizard Gandalf and a bunch of Dwarves show up at Bilbo’s house, lay out the premise of journeying to the Lonely Mountain, killing the dragon Smaug and reclaiming a great pile of treasure, and Bilbo, after a bit of persuading, agrees to accompany them for a share in said treasure. That all happens in the first chapter, and most of the book consists of random tangents and obstacles on the way towards that goal. The second chapter was probably the lowest point, where the group happens across the three trolls, and then Gandalf pulls a rabbit out of a hat and solves everything. During most of the book, the characters are still just a mess, the thirteen dwarves are merely a series of names, and it’s up to Gandalf to sort out literally everything that goes wrong. He leaves the group about half-way through the story for an unspecified reason, and this just goes to highlight how useless the whole Dwarf-company actually are – during the long slog through Mirkwood it’s up to Bilbo, the wild-card newcomer, to virtually carry the rest of the characters through.

          The Dwarves really are a useless bunch of faceless no-hopers, as far as characters go. That there are thirteen of them could have meant that some could have been fleshed out into fully-functioning characters; but no, they’re all effectively the same, bar the cursory input of Thorin, Fili/Kili, and Bombur the overweight comic-relief, and they act more like padding for the story rather than anything worthwhile.

          Okay, maybe I’m being a little too critical of this. Yes, I know it’s a children’s story, and I remember enjoying it when I was a youngster. If the story were more complicated then it might miss the point, and ignorance of a majority of the characters probably helps the reader to focus on Bilbo, as the protagonist. Right, now I’ve got my major gripes out of the way I’ll be a bit more positive.

          The best character? Gollum, the demented creature whom Bilbo exchanges riddles with, and inadvertently steals a magic ring from. Long before I became familiar with The Lord of the Rings, Gollum was the character who most stayed in my mind from The Hobbit. He’s just so vastly different from any of the other character in the book, so much more detailed in personality and speech. That his background is never explicitly revealed, only hinted at, is the best thing about him – a creature living underground, full of malice and treachery, but who has dim recollections of a time when this was not so. However, I have since learned that this might well be because of Tolkein’s subsequent revision of the character, after the original publication of the book; the reason Gollum might be more interesting is because he was one of several changes made in later editions of the novel, after Tolkein began work on The Lord of the Rings. Oh well; unless you read a first edition that won’t prove to be an issue, for in my copy he’s one of the best bits.

          One thing I should say is that The Hobbit starts off badly, but gets slowly better as it progresses. It’s not until the last quarter of the book that I really properly began to enjoy the thing. Smaug the dragon was quite excellent as an antagonist, but the real villain of the story was something quite unexpected. All through the novel we’ve known where it was going to end; at a confrontation with the dragon. But it’s the consequences of undertaking the quest that proves to be the real antagonist. The killing of Smaug sets off a chain of events that leads to a quite serious final few chapters, where what was once a simple children’s story about a quest in a world of magic gradually finds its feet as a tale of greed, and the consequences of the quest. I actually really enjoyed this bit, and it was worth getting through the crappy trolls in chapter two, and the slog through Mirkwood, just to reach this last section.

          I don’t think I can whole-heartedly recommend you read The Hobbit, as there are a couple of problems with it. Then again, as I said before it gets better as you go along, and by the time Bilbo and company reach the Lonely Mountain the real story has begun. You probably know already if you’re a fan of Tolkein, in which case I’ve probably just wasted your time. A real look at Tolkein will involve digesting The Lord of the Rings, because The Hobbit by comparison is just a cheesy little prologue, a wafer-thin hint at what is still to come.

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

In a previous review I mentioned my... disdain for Victorian literature. Rather callously I dismissed it as long-winded, overwritten, and miserable to the degree of making me want to beat my head against the sideboard. I was aware that I was making a prejudiced and unfair generalisation, so now I am making up for past wrongs – and I am glad to say that my ignorance on this matter has been well and truly obliterated.

Charles Dickens, is a titan of Victorian literature. We all know him, even if we’ve never actually bothered to read any of his works. Under recommendation, I dug into Great Expectations and found myself enjoying it by the end of the very first page. In a nutshell, the story concerns the life of a young county urchin, Pip, orphaned and in the care of his adult sister and her husband, the village blacksmith. Pip, after many years, then finds that he is in line to inherit a considerable sum of money, and departs to London to become a wealthy so-and-so, and eventually, in the third section of the novel, the “shit hits the fan” (a very specific Victorian phrase I have used in order to sum up the overall state of things without giving away the plot). The story itself is very good, but what raises it to the state of absolute brilliance is the way it is told, and the characters who inhabit it.

Dickens’ writing is faultless. It contains a sense of humour that is more akin to Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat) than to the abject dreary misery of Somerset Maugham (my nemesis of a writer, for Of Human Bondage, the most painfully depressingly slow book I have ever read). Great Expectations has much the same levels of depressing material, but the writing has a life to it that puts me in mind of the author chuckling on occasion, as he writes.

The start of the book details Pip’s childhood encounter with an escaped convict out on the moors. The convict threatens Pip to bring him food, and the young lad is so terrified that he does so, raiding his own home and coming away with, amongst other things, a pork pie. As he returns to the convict over the moors, Pip is so plagued by fear and guilt at his theft that he begins to see the very landscape and animals he passes as knowing him to be a thief. The cattle stare accusingly at him.

          ‘The gates and dykes and banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly as could be, “A boy with Somebody-else’s pork pie! Stop him!”’ (chapter 3, Penguin Classics edition)

I am a fan of pork pies, and to see one take such an important role for a brief time gives me no end of pleasure. Many parts of the story stand out in my mind for their moments of literary perfection, and not just the ones that contain my favourite foods. I can only bow down in amazement at such a writer.

In terms of characters, Miss Havisham is the most striking – an embittered old woman, jilted on her wedding decades before, who has locked herself away in her decrepit mansion and keeps the place in exactly the same state as it was on that fateful day. She refuses to wear anything other than her tatty old wedding dress, and lives a life of theatrically orchestrated sorrow and hatred. In short, she is quite mad.

Alongside Pip’s domestic tyrant of a sister is Joe, technically Pip’s brother-in-law, but in reality they are fellow downtrodden souls under the tyrant’s boot, who have a strong and genuine friendship. There’s Jaggers the lawyer, who treats every conversation as a possibility for inviting indictment from anyone who happens to be within miles of earshot-range; Wemmick, Jagger’s dogsbody who has an affinity for ‘portable property’ and keeps his work-life and his home-life separate to such a massive degree that you might suspect him of having multiple-personality syndrome. There’s Wemmick’s deaf old father who goes by the designation of Aged Parent, and a bedridden old boatman who exists only as a force of barely-suppressed rage in the room upstairs, and mention must be made of Pip’s love interest Estella, the adoptive daughter of Miss Havisham – you remember Miss Havisham? Well Estella was raised by her, after Miss Havisham locked herself away amidst her stopped clocks, and her mummified wedding feast. What sort of lovely person is Estella going to turn out to be, we wonder.

And this is just my lucky-dip character guide, as there are so many others – incidental characters, important characters, all so very well fleshed out and developed.

There are moments of odd deliciousness throughout the story, ones that kept me reading long after I should have put the book down and indulged in the necessity of sleep. Chapter 23, for instance, where we meet the Pocket family, the chaos of the family home overwhelmed with children is probably my favourite part – though this is a very difficult choice to make, considering all I have to choose from.

I would have to conclude by saying that Great Expectations is one of the best novels I have ever read. It is a solid, enjoyable, engrossing story with remarkable, well-developed characters and one of the best writing styles I have ever encountered. There were one or two moments when a tear was almost brought to my eye, and anything that can dig that far down into my calcified heart must be a good thing. There is no more reason for me to wonder why Dickens is considered one of the greatest, and he has shown me that the dreary Victorian novelists I once abhorred are not what I expected them to be. Either that, or I’m growing more Victorian as time passes. In any event, if you haven’t read this book yet, then I thoroughly advise you to do so; you might be as surprised as I was, in which case you’ll have a thoroughly decent book to read.