Read Merrily

Saturday, December 31, 2005

A Christmas Carol

Reading Dickens, i've decided, is not really my thing. I find it too wordy and laboured and it bores me a little. That said, listening to Dickens is a whole different ball game. I downloaded this one from a free Podcast, in 5 easy stages, and listened to it as i was getting ready to sleep over several nights. It was the full version but i much preferred having it read to me. Dickens lends itself very well to performance i think and possibly to being delivered in chunks in the way it was often done, serialised in the papers of the era.

I have to say, then, that i very much enjoyed this one in the format i partook of it. It's a funny book, an emotional book, a gentle and sometimes not so gentle poke at human nature. At times it is brutal and judging and with a message in it that is just as relevant, perhaps even more so, today as it was then. It is touching to see Scrooge want to change, to be easily changed, to be mortified and humbled by the person he has become. I don't think that tv versions do that side of it justice; they show, for dramatic effect perhaps, a man who has to be tuned, but the book shows a Scrooge who is humiliated and brought low by his lowness from almost the beginning. It is a story of someone getting their comeuppance early, for their own good. it is a story of faith, perhaps, a story of friendship, of change, of doing right.

I came unstuck trying to decide if Scrooge would have changed had he only seen his affect on other people and not seen that he was hated and despised. The Scrooge at the beginning of the book wouldn't have cared, the Scrooge after one spirit has already begun to care. Does he care that his chains are waiting or that he has brought sadness? I'm not sure it is that cut and dried, i think there are elements of both in there - change for good for others, change to change his own future, beyond that which is bound by living time. Clever Dickens, more than meets the eye there, i felt.

I think, in the end, i am most fascinated by something that i blogged; why, when this story is the story of a man changing, of a man rebeginning, of a man making amends do we use the term Scrooge to refer to a person who is mean? It should refer to someone who is the opposite, someone who befits the moral of the story. Do we, the reader, decern his true motivation? Is that why Scrooge lives on, because he reminds us of our own natural selfishness?

12:32 PM

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An attempt to get through everything i haven't already read in the BBC Big Read Top 100 during this year (hmmmm... maybe a little longer than 2004 actually... didn't bargain on the pregnancy and baby!!!!!)

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