The latest film adaptation of ‘Great Expectations’ might finally give the novel the treatment it deserves

I have great expectations of Great Expectations, the forthcoming film version of Charles Dickens’s novel, directed by Mike Newell and written by the novelist David Nicholls.

This is unusual, because I tend to get very proprietorial when it comes to my favourite books. Having been disappointed many times in the past, my initial reaction to the news that a beloved novel is coming to the screen is now a kind of wary suspicion tempered with the faint hope that maybe, this time, they’ll get it right and do the book I love justice.

There are few books I love more than Great Expectations, which has seemed to me, ever since I first read it as a teenager, to be an almost perfect novel. With its wildly inventive plotting, its extraordinary characters, its warmth and darkness and fizzing humour, it’s everything that makes Dickens great bundled into one conveniently short book.

I first read it thanks to the Department of Education. I studied it for my Inter Cert, and while few books appear at their best in a classroom, I was bewitched. The plot was gripping, right from the famous opening scene in which Pip, a young orphan living with his dreadful sister and her kindly blacksmith husband Joe, encounters an escaped convict in a graveyard.

But what really won me over was how surprisingly funny the writing was. Dickens has a reputation for being over the top and grotesque, and, having never read any of his books before, I had vaguely imagined that his comedy was of the heavy-handed, slapstick kind. I wasn’t prepared for the gloriously surreal wit that pervaded the entire book.

In a recent Guardian article, David Nicholls discussed the difficulty of transferring Dickens’s humour to the screen, because it “lies in the narrative voice; Dickens is keeping the best jokes for himself. Mr Pickwick ‘fell into the barrow, and fast asleep, simultaneously’ has a linguistic playfulness that is lost when you just show a man falling into a wheelbarrow. It may well be funny, but in a different way.”

If you like a narrative voice, you’ll go wherever it takes you, and the Dickens of Great Expectations takes the reader into some intriguing places. An air of magic hangs over the entire story, from the convict Magwitch’s monstrous arrival to Wemmick, a strait-laced legal clerk who lives in a miniature castle, complete with drawbridge, in deepest suburbia. There’s a hint of Cinderella in Pip’s transformation from blacksmith to gentleman thanks to a mysterious benefactor.

And then, of course, there’s Miss Havisham. The woman in the ragged wedding dress who attempts to freeze time at the moment she was jilted over two decades before is such an instantly iconic figure, it feels surprising that she didn’t already exist in myth.

But there’s real emotional complexity behind these characters. Dickens has been accused of creating archetypes rather than real people, but Pip – tormented, corrupted, lying to his family and to himself before finding redemption – is totally convincing.

Dickens was the grandson of servants, the son of an irresponsible debtor, and a man who kept secret the fact that he had been sent to work in a factory as a child from almost all who knew him. When Pip says that “it is a most miserable thing to be ashamed of home”, it’s hard not to think that his creator knew how Pip felt even as he shows the folly of his snobbery.

Proof of life

In fact, Great Expectations counters the most common criticisms of Dickens-haters. Think he’s sentimental? There’s nothing sentimental about the brutally heartbreaking way Pip’s relationship with Joe, and indeed Estella, is described. If you find his books too long and baggy, well, my edition is just 477 pages, and the plot is as beautifully and tautly constructed as a whodunnit – although really it’s a who-gave-it.

Seeing all the narrative strands come together is hugely satisfying and, as Nicholls wrote, “even if you spot the first twist, the second still comes as a surprise”. The book also offers some fine counterpoints to Dickens’s infamously weak female characters – Estella, raised by Miss Havisham to break men’s hearts without ever feeling love herself, is just as corrupted as Pip, and is more complicated than a typical femme fatale; sensible, no-nonsense Biddy is the antithesis of Bleak House’s sickeningly saintly Esther Summerson.

Whether all this will transfer to the screen is, however, a different matter. With the exception of David Lean’s beautiful 1946 film, virtually no adaptation has captured the novel’s mixture of heartbreak, wit and dark magic, from the misguided 1998 modern-day version to last year’s dour BBC series.

But I’m cautiously optimistic about the new one, not least because Nicholls clearly loves the novel and understands what will work on screen and what won’t. And if he hasn’t pulled it off, well, December is the perfect time to curl up by the fire with the original book, and fall in love with it all over again.

What larks.