The Past, the Present, and the Future: A Review of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol

So true to my word on one, if not the many, pre-New Year's resolutions that I've made, tonight I finished up my first of 11 works of fiction to read in the next 12 months - A Christmas Carol. In all fairness to my detractors, yes, this 'book' is only a 80 or so page story, but by virtue of its timeless and seasonal nature, and by virtue of the size of my next classic literary endeavor, the 892-page Don Quixote, I say this one counts!So A Christmas Carol, what can I say? I can say that as with most of the movie versions of this story that I've experienced, the book brought tears to my eyes. I think unlike in some of the movies though, where I've liked the story but not very much liked Scrooge, in the book, I really rooted for him the entire time. It's written in the third person, but you as the audience never leave his side, and I seemed to understand for the first time the psychology of Scrooge - how a man raised with a cold father away from home, pushed toward greatness among peers likely better off than him, he might have missed opportunities along the way to embrace charity and compassion in the dogged pursuit of security and self-sufficiency. He seemed more like a child who had not yet grown up in these ways, who was still clinging to false notions of a Darwinian social order and afraid to let them go, than a pure and simple miser. And how kind, and what a testament from Dickens as to the mercy of God, that Scrooge's only life friend, even in death, would be allowed to usher him into a more loving way to live.

And the book is funny! Those sayings we take for granted in the story that we've heard since childhood really take flight in the book. One that gets me every time is when Scrooge discovers he hasn't missed Christmas and marvels, "The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can." It's like 80 years of pent-up wonder coming out in Scrooge all at once.

One part missing from the on-screen story I've often seen is this quote by the narrator, which I love:

"Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him."

It seems reassuring to think, especially at this unnecessarily harried time of Christmas, that both the unsimple good and the simple good come around in the end to laughter.

Obviously I recommend this book, and the spirit behind it!

Now onto a story about a man who is in no way like Scrooge. Expect my review a month or so from now, and hold me to it! It's time for 10 in 11.5!!