Last December, I decided our almost-eight-year-old daughter was ready for a version of "A Christmas Carol" not dumbed down by Disney.
I didn't imagine she would listen in rapt silence to 28,000 words on a single night, but I certainly thought she could make it, over two or three nights, to the end.
She lasted five minutes.
Some parents, at that point, would blame her near-total boredom with Scrooge on computer games and kiddie TV and an overly permissive culture.
Not this parent.
Books change over time, and over 170 years, "A Christmas Carol" has changed more than most. We like a punchy opening; "A Christmas Carol" is a slow starter. By our standards, the language is clotted and the piece is seriously overwritten --- as I was reading it, I was scanning ahead to see what I could paraphrase or cut.
(It's not generally noted, but it didn't take 170 years for young readers to be bored by Dickens. In America on a lecture tour, Dickens was approached by a young girl. She said she loved his books, but she had a confession: "I do skip some of the very dull parts, once in a while; not the short dull parts, but the long ones." The great writer's response was to laugh --- and take out his notebook and ask for details.)
A few weeks after the non-start with our daughter, I realized that I want her to experience "A Christmas Carol" sooner than later. And I got serious --- I started to work on the text. My goal wasn't to rewrite Dickens, just to update the archaic language, trim the dialogue, cut the extraneous characters --- to reduce the book to its essence, which is the story. In the end, I did have to write a bit, but not, I hope, so you'll notice; I think of my words as minor tailoring, like sewing on a missing button or patching a rip at the knee.
The "Christmas Carol" that awaits you is half the length of the original. Like the Paige Peterson illustrations that accompany it, it means to convey the feeling of 19th century London in 1843, but without the formal diction and Victorian heaviness --- it means to be a story that adults can read to their captivated kids right to the end, and that kids, starting with my daughter, can read by themselves with pleasure.
May I ask a favor? Like Dickens, I'd love to know what works in this version of "A Christmas Carol" --- and what doesn't. If you read it to your brood during this holiday season, would you take a moment and comment (below)? Or, if you prefer, write me at HeadButlerNYC@AOL.com. Many thanks.
-- Jesse Kornbluth
Arnold M. Eisen: A Jew at Christmas
Ralph da Costa Nunez: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like A Christmas Carol
Michael Giltz: DVDs: Peanuts and Other New Holiday Titles
- Truman Capote.
Nice synopsis, but I wouldn't call it a story. It's the "what it's about", minus the inner music. All that "dead as a doornail" stuff in the original is in there for a reason. First of all, "...dead ... dead .... dead ..." creates the appropriate atmosphere for a ghost story far better than "Marley was dead" does. Second, all that playful banter from the narrator establishes that you don't really need to be afraid of ghosts, at least not right now, because he is there to deal with them should any appear. It'll be different when the light is out and you're trying to sleep. If any ghosts appear then, then you'd better be prepared to banter with them yourself like Scrooge did, and to learn any valuable life lessons that they have to offer. Simply cowering under the sheets won't cut it, no matter how much you may want to.
If anybody reading your synopsis is motivated to discover the original, then you have performed a valuable service, of which I approve. However maybe you should have put more of yourself into this, because it isn't Dickens and if it isn't you either then it isn't anybody. There's a place for abridged rewrites - see e.g. "Tales from Shakespeare" by Charles and Mary Lamb. But "Tales" is pointedly more Lamb than Shakespeare.
When I tried reading the Hobbit to my child she hated it - but rather than re-writing Tolkien I just went to a different story.
It's the WAY Charles Dickens tells the story of "A Christmas Carol" that makes it a great work of art. Your daughter now knows the story events of this classic novelette. So what? Next time save yourself the trouble and just read her the Cliff Notes or Spark Notes or Barron's Notes version. They too will efficiently disseminate the events of the story to her, if that's all you want anyway.
There's nothing sacred about the writings of Dickens, and Austen, and Shelley, et al. They get a hundred years of copyright, for pity's sake... ONE HUNDRED FREAKIN' YEARS. Once that's up, their material is fair game. That doesn't mean you have to like each and every version... or even that you may not always appreciate the original version best... but it's a bit much to come here and protest that newer versions are somehow invalid.
I'll always think Cohen's original 'Hallelujah' is the touchstone of that song... but that doesn't mean I go around blasting Jeff Buckley for having the nerve to experiment with it.
In short, it was not my intention to "blast" anyone, but to point out that efficiently disseminating the fictional events that transpire in a story is not the same thing as masterful story telling.
Summarized Dickens is not Dickens, any more than the Classics Illustrated version of Moby-Dick is Melville's novel. Creating a "only the good parts" version is called Bowlderization.