Honestly, you know you’ve made it big when The Muppets adapt your work. Though whether people knowing the notes of your novel due to overexposure to cartoons and parodies rather than actually having read it could be counted as success, could be up for debate. In any case, upon realising that I knew basically the entire story without any lick of its original context, I picked up Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol for the next leg of my foray into classics.
If I’m being honest, I was originally going to review Great Expectations, but—while being full of colourful characters and clever social commentary—it left me in such a weary state I decided to try out something with more bounce. A Christmas Carol is a standout work of Dickens’, different to his usual style and one could argue less ‘mature’, but never let it be said it’s not literature because it’s full of melodrama and ghosts and barely-veiled-to-the-point-of-being-preachy morals about humanitarianism.
A Christmas Carol (as I’m sure you all know, whether from Mickey Mouse or Muppets or anywhere in between—if my Google image search serves to inform, there’s even a Sonic the Hedgehog version) is the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, a… well, a quintessential scrooge (funny that) who hoards money and loves no one, and scoffs in the face of the jolly nature of Christmas. We first meet him when he’s huddled over in his office, begrudgingly giving his assistant one day off with pay, saying “bah! Humbug!” to festivities, and commenting that we ought to start burning orphans for fuel so The Poor contribute something to society. Well, not quite, but damn near close enough. Basically, he’s a privileged, entitled old white man turned up to eleven on the ‘people you wouldn’t want as your neighbour’ scale. If he was alive today, he’d probably write to his local newspaper complaining about immigrants and Millennials. Continue reading
The Afictionado 