Books read this week: A Christmas Carol 8/10 (Charles Dickens), Gaslight Arcanum: Uncanny Tales of Sherlock Holmes 7/10
Strange to say, I've never actually read any Dickens before now, and yet A Christmas Carol seems very familiar - a little like reading A Midsummer Night's Dream or Julius Caesar for the first time so many of the phrases and ideas in the book have entered the popular conscience that it feels like reading a book I already know. There is, near my parents' home, a church which goes by the wonderfully Dickensian name of the "Ebenezer Strict Baptist Church", a name which I can associate in my mind only with an elderly miser shouting "television is the work of the devil!"; indeed it's probably true to say that Dickens has ruined Ebenezer as a name forever more.
It is, of course, extremely good, and when I get time I'm going to work through some more Dickens (probably starting with some of the shorter stuff), and Dickens knows exactly how to push our emotional buttons. That said, whilst reading A Christmas Carol I was struck by the essential bankruptcy of the Dickens' nineteenth century liberal approach to social problems, and of the political philosophies which base themselves on it today. It's all well and good that Scrooge has his epiphany, and obviously it is a good thing for Scrooge that he starts doing good works to counteract his previous ill deeds, but it is a terrible thing that Bob Crachit and Tiny Tim are so totally dependent on his whims in the first place.
Indeed this is the fundamental problem with relying upon philanthropy to provide social services: the emphasis tends to be upon making the philanthropist feel good about themselves, rather than actually relieving distress; we can see this in that the Christmas Carol is about Scrooge's redemption - it's not about the Cratchit family's survival, except in so far as that impacts upon Scrooge's state of grace. Add to that the voluntary nature of philantropy, and the requirement to adhere to social norms that tends to be an unspoken requirement for receiving charity, and you have a system I can't embrace; indeed, one of the better passages of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a brutally cutting attack on the Organised Benevolence Society from someone who's had to sit on the other side of the table.
Gaslight Arcanum is a compendium of short stories which pit Sherlock Holmes against the weird, the wonderful and the exotic. I do like short stories - they are a format not much used today, and I do not read so many as I would like. However I was torn about what grade to give it; most of the stories in it are actually pretty bad, some because they miss the fundamental point of Sherlock Holmes, which is his mighty brain and his ability to always to know more than both Watson and the reader (something which could be done well with supernatural themes, but really isn't here), and some because they really aren't anything to do with Sherlock Holmes, but he's been shoehorned in so they fit into the anthology (the story in which Holmes is murdered before the first line by superintelligent killer bees is a particular low point. And yes, it is quite as bad as it sounds). This reinforced my usual resolution to avoid fan fiction, in all it's forms (except when it's written by William Makepeace Thackeray).
On the other hand the book only cost £2 and concludes with a marvellous tale by Kim Newman, "The Adventure of the Six Maledictions", which is absolutely brilliant, laugh out loud funny and gleefully dark. Of course, the reason it can manage this is that it is not, strictly, a Sherlock Holmes story - in fact the man himself does not appear once - it is, rather a Moriarty story. This gives Newman an almost blank canvas to work from; all Conan Doyle tells us of Moriarty is that he is i) "A Napoleon of Crime" and ii) formerly a mathematics professor. And of course we also have Colonel Moran, who (in Newman's tale) fulfils the role of Watson, giving a wonderfully cynical and roguish perspective on life, which is (I'm fairly sure, although I've not actually read the books) modelled on the Flashman series. I don't think it's entirely coincidental that the only other Holmes story not written by Conan Doyle I've really enjoyed is Gaiman's "A Study in Emerald" - also a Moriarty story. I think using characters connected to, but not fully described in a work of literature in a homage helps because I don't know enough about the characters to know that they're not acting right - if I did know that it would wreck my enjoyment of the story. Of course, I'm now going to have to track down Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (and read Hamlet) to test my theory.
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