Artful and insightful—an accompanying character study and prequel to a timeless classic
Classics are classics because they go on resonating generation after generation, and they continue to offer ground for succeeding writers to build upon. From Aeschylus to Madeline Miller, people have been reimagining and adapting the heroes of Homer, for example, for over two millenia. Another literary golden age, perhaps even brighter than that of ancient Greece, is, of course, Victorian England, and there is hardly a Victorian classic more well established than A Christmas Carol. Scott A. Johnson has taken the most striking character from Charles Dickens’s famous tale and deftly imagined its own story.
In Johnson’s imagining, The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, the last ghost from A Christmas Carol, is an elemental part of creation and personifies darkness. Shadow, which is how this entity is referred to in the story, has not to do with death but with its consequences, with what the future is going to miss due to each loss. The entity witnesses the evolution of humans and their unlucky ability to expect death as well as to fear it, setting itself the task to show mankind the shadow they are casting, feeling this will be enough to change them for the better.
The Shadow has visited hundreds of people through the centuries. The first one we read about is Bran, a native of Britain fighting against the Roman conquerors. We then move forward over a thousand years, to an English wool merchant set solidly in her ways. Most memorably, the next setting is that of Thorbury in 1348, a small town devastated by the Black Death. Finally, we are naturally transported to London on Christmas Eve, 1843.
Remarkable, and the thing which receives the best execution in the book, is the Shadow’s struggle with its own purpose, as, throughout the course of these pages, it deals with doubt and failure. It is a startling and humanizing view of the monolithic figure that is Dickens’s Ghost. Johnson imbues this lifeless specter with the most human of qualities. Anxiety and confusion drive the Shadow to find its way and decide on its role in the life of people.
Johnson writes with a simple and cogent style. It relies heavily on a pattern of short sentences—often only three words long—that create tension followed by paragraph-long elaborations that release it. Although the writing feels particularly unforced, there is scarcely an unpleasing sentence in the book. There are, however, a few places where repeating less would have meant more.
Unconnected, I would be remiss if I did not include this stately, resonantly classical passage leading up to our meeting Ebenezer Scrooge:
“Normal life. The beautiful, oblivious machinery of human existence grinding on, unaware that three spirits were converging upon a single room in a silent house where a single cold man lay in a narrow bed, sleeping the shallow, restless sleep of the guilty.”
Scott A. Johnson’s The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a surely welcome addition to the Dickens universe, reminding us that, as A Christmas Carol proclaimed, the time before us is our own to make amends in.
The post The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come by Scott A. Johnson appeared first on Independent Book Review.