The last 50 pages are so sensationally tense that you read them naughtily, one eye on the sentence in hand, the other attempting vainly to cheat and flick a head. It robs a pulsating story of the narrative climax it promised. Though the novel's emotional complexity is deepened. I'd be churlish to give the ending away. Let just say that dickens, the great performer of his own work, would surely have blushed to read it. But if the writer and critic and me ask these questions, the reader never did, not for a single moment.