Childhood Nemeses

A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
1843, Chapman and Hall
Heroes
by Robert Cormier
1998, Puffin


I have to admit a strong aversion to Dickens. (Perhaps the snob within me is turned off by the lack of complexity in his plots or by his archetypal characters.) So it was with some small amount of dread that I agreed to teach in my reading class his classic A Christmas Carol. My students and I spent three short weeks reading this book (appropriately enough, just before the holiday season) and contrary to my expectations, I was very much enamored with Dickens and all of his trappings.

I also ought to admit a strong attraction to Cormier's work. Two of my all-time favorite children's novels are his brilliant I Am the Cheese and The Chocolate War. His prose is emotionally fraught and his characters brooding, a combination seemingly unlikely for young adult fiction - but this is the essence of why his books are so wonderful. Cormier refuses to talk down to his audience and in doing so, he reaches them far more directly than any number of pandering novelists might.

Dickens is by no means a young adult novelist. However, it is a testament to the appeal (and simplicity) of his novels that so many of them have become co-opted for children's enjoyment (think Disney's Oliver & Company). A Christmas Carol is the best example of this, with its plethora of cinematic and theatrical adaptations. Each adaptation seems to get increasingly saccharine and, foolishly, I assumed the novel would follow in tone.

It was with no small amount of surprise that I fell in love with the book. Dickens' eye for detail is incredibly astute and as such his prose is rife with lush passages evoking Scrooge's London. The descriptions grow increasingly bright as the book progresses along with Scrooge's emotional re-birth.

I am sometimes disdainful of books whose sole purpose is to create some sort of world to inhabit for the span of the audience's involvement with the book. (This goes doubly so for film, Cameron's Avatar a perfect example of a film I am reluctant to see.) This is a large part of Dickens' purpose in A Christmas Carol and is perhaps its greatest asset. Dickens creates a full physical environment within which the reader can dwell at length, but his ability to manipulate tone and to evoke mood are equal parts of what makes London seemingly come to life in the book.

A secondary purpose of Dickens' in writing the book, I discovered as I was teaching it, was to chastise England's rich and to motivate them to enact labor reform laws. This was certainly an interesting angle to teach to my students, particularly in connection with Dickens' "rediscovery" of Christmas and the extent to which the Christmas festival was a tool he used to that end.

What makes A Christmas Carol so surprising as a children's literary archetype is that the book is thematically very adult. The book's message of goodwill toward man and to repent for past sins are attitudes intrinsic to childhood. The deeper emotional tensions of regret for those sins and desire for self-improvement are completely lost on children.

This does not impoverish my experience of reading the book, but rather improve it. The expectation of the saccharine ghost story I knew of my childhood was a delightful thing to have dashed.

Cormier's story, on the other hand, was a surprise in its disappointment. Cormier's work has always dealt with serious adolescent themes and his work causes his readers to live up to the standard of emotional empathy that his narratives set. Heroes is no exception to this statement; it is concerned with the aftermath of war and the fleeting torment of love lost.

While portions of the book are quite beautifully narrated, it seems also to be a rather single-minded work. The main character is literally and emotionally scarred from his performance in World War II and returns, disguised, to his hometown to seek revenge on a community "hero".

This dichotomy between the concept of heroism and harsh reality is the central motivating factor in the novel and every chapter pursues to some small degree elaborating on the plot context that elicits this thematic construct.

The chapters eventually begin to lag with the weight of Cormier's snail pacing. The book alternates too regularly between flash back and the present and Cormier's revelatory plot points are meticulously planted despite being an incredibly short book (barely over a hundred pages) it felt as though it were a short story aspiring to greater heights than it warranted.

Obviously, these two works make unlikely bedside-table-mates. But considering my decades-long aversion to Dickens and my hero worship of Cormier, these were revealing books with which to spend some time.