Unfortunately, that’s typical of this novel: Its violent acts are related with Victorian decorum its emotional range is as tightly drawn as Mother Scrooge’s corset.

Alas, we hear just the barest details of that New World adventure, which gives us more time for drawing-room chatter. Inexplicably, a potentially fantastic story line involving Marley in America takes place offstage. To its own detriment, the narrative concentrates too much on genteel domestic scenes and refined romantic conversations. If Marley has any flaws, it’s that this Battle of the Bookkeepers is not sufficiently dramatic to carry along the whole story. Although Clinch relies on the details provided in A Christmas Carol, he never seems cramped by them. Read Full Review >Ĭlinch creates wholly original stories that snap together with the edges of classics we all know. We can but hope that this masterly Gothic prequel will banish forever the Currier and Ives version of Dickens’s dark fable.

Clinch’s Marley is one of the great farouche characters, at once frightening and dangerously attractive. Clinch has done something remarkable in Marley, not merely offering a parergon to Dickens’s little masterpiece.but creating a free-standing dystopian universe, a hideous vision of nascent capitalism in which nothing is real and every transaction is a fraud issuing from the brain of a master forger, who by the end has reduced even his own life, quite literally, to a trompe l’oeil. His most startling and creative conception is the title character. Clinch endows Dickens’s snapshots with a three-dimensional, often alarming, life. Here, as there, he fleshes out characters and events often very lightly sketched in the original. he creates a penumbra of invention around the original novel ensuring - caveat lector! - that you may never be able to think of it in the same way again. By some uncanny act of artistic appropriation, he has, without imitating Dickens, entered into the phantasmagoric realm that is the great novelist’s quintessential territory, and, like the fat boy in Pickwick, he triumphantly succeeds in making our flesh creep. A Christmas Carol, despite the multitudinous saccharine versions souped up on stage and screen every festive season, is a pretty damn scary thing, but Jon Clinch’s prequel to it is black as hell, outstripping even Dickens’s remorseless and painful probings of his protagonist’s soul.

Jon clinch marley