A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol

 By Charles Dickens

No rating again this time, though for entirely different reasons than The Manuel of Aeronautics.  A Christmas Carol is a story and message that has stood the test of time.  It is imbued in our cultural DNA.  There has been every variation and iteration on the theme.  So to try and give it a rating is to court folly.  That doesn’t mean I don’t have anything to say.  Reading the book is very different than watching one of the adaptations (Mickey, Muppet and George C. Scott being canon in my family), mostly because of all the little things that a reader can pick up on.

Firstly, Dickens has a way with words.  Despite a very different style than most twenty-first century writing, it is instantly accessible and readable.  Only part of that is because the story is so familiar.  The narrator is conversational and willing to explain things with humorous asides.  The very opening sets the reader at ease.  From early on: “Marley was as dead as a doornail.  Mind! I don’t mean to know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclines, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.”  Such writing engenders a genteel conviviality that makes one desire to listen to the narrator is going to say.

Secondly, Dickens makes wonderful use of all the senses.  His descriptions truly bring scenes to life; though this may be a side effect of having frequently seen the scenes brought to life on screen.  And sometimes the descriptions do go on a bit long.

And lastly, there are the things that don’t generally make it into the adaptations.  Sometimes there is good reason for this.  The description of the Ghost of Christmas Past is particularly confusing: old and young, tall and short, sometimes with one hand and sometimes with twenty,  It is like Dickens was trying to make the image all things to all people and in doing so made it nothing to anyone.  Yet the inverse is true of one of the great Gothic creations, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.  In simplicity of prose, Dickens is able to conjure an image that taps into a universal idea of dread and terror. 

There is one thing that bugs me, something that is usually changed in other formats.  Marley says that Scrooge will be visited by three ghosts, but on three successive days.  But in the end Scrooge says they did it all in one night. Was it some sort of Groundhog’s Day where Scrooge relived Christmas Eve three times so that the spirits could visit?  In the long run (and A Christmas Carol has had a long run) this is a minor quibble, because the message the story imparts is really one we should try to live everyday.