7/2/2023 0 Comments Marley jon clinchSimon Callow, The New York Times Book Review “By some uncanny act of artistic appropriation, Clinch has, without imitating Dickens, entered into the phantasmagoric realm that is the great novelist’s quintessential territory. In doing so, he makes the story his own, deepening our understanding of Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, and the perilous situation in which Scrooge will find himself when Marley’s ghost appears before him. Jon Clinch puts an entirely new spin on the classic tale, making Scrooge and Marley business partners who become rivals, conspiring to destroy each other no matter the cost to anyone around them. In this telling, Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge are two schemers in early-nineteenth-century London, unpleasant cogs in the engine of Empire. But in Jon Clinch’s ingenious new novel, Jacob Marley is very much alive: a rapacious and cunning boy who grows up to become a forger, a scoundrel, and, in partnership with his childhood friend Ebenezer Scrooge, owner of a company whose profits derive from the soon-to-be-outlawed slave trade. So Charles Dickens tells us at the start of A Christmas Carol.
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