Book Choice: Great Expectations or A Separate Peace Unit 2

Great Expectations In what may be Dickens’s best novel, humble, orphaned Pip is apprenticed to the dirty work of the forge but dares to dream of becoming a gentleman— and one day, under sudden circumstances, he finds himself in possession of “great expectations.” In this gripping tale of crime and guilt, revenge and reward, the compelling characters include Magwitch, the fearful and fearsome convict; Estella, whose beauty is excelled only by her haughtiness; and the embittered Miss Havisham, an eccentric jilted bride.

A Separate Peace An American classic and great bestseller for over thirty years, A Separate Peace is timeless in its description of adolescence during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to the second world war. Set at a boys’ boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.

Emotional power, for one thing; sheer page-turning dramatic tension, for another. Although it is not as uproariously funny or as blazingly angry as some of Dickens’ earlier fiction, it offers a compensatory depth of feeling, subtlety of tone and density of atmosphere - G K Chesterton praised its ‘quality of serene irony and even sadness which puts it quite alone among his other works’. It manages to be both extraordinarily perceptive about childhood, and maturely sceptical in its adult morality. The plot moves swiftly and surely, without any of the tired, flat patches of writing which mar A Tale of Two Cities or Our Mutual Friend. Its premise is simple: the orphaned Pip Pirrip is anonymously bequeathed a large amount of money which allows him to leave his humble background and live like a gentleman in London, until a surprise from his childhood catches up with him. On this basis, Dickens builds both a tautly constructed thriller and a moving story of disappointment and disillusion, told in the first person through Pip’s narrative voice, ruefully looking back at himself from some unspecified vantage point.