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Until recently, we assumed that Jacob T. Marley, a bit player in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, was left to wander in misery chained to his cash boxes. (Well, I did anyway.) R. William Bennett answers many, if not all, of the questions you may have had about Marley. Who was he really? How did he and Scrooge meet when they are both such unlikable characters? And the biggie: why did Marley get such a raw deal compared to Scrooge? Nobody gave him a chance to make things right in his own life.
This story takes characters from the classic and looks at them from another perspective. Here we follow Marley and get a full history about the fellow, and why things happened in A Christmas Carol the way they did. When I first read A Christmas Carol, I figured Marley was just a catalyst for Scrooge used by the spirits to get his attention. I felt like Marley wasn't given a choice and based on his imprisonment was forced to introduce the spirits to Scrooge. I like what this story does to dispel those ideas.
Bennett captures the spirit and language of the original tale wonderfully. The story doesn't change but is added to in a masterful way. Bennett digs down into the meat of the original story while maintaining the integrity of the Dickens tale. It was obvious that Bennett really tried to stay true to the classic while giving further insight into why these events took place at all. I loved the different perspective and, as I said, the concepts it added to the original for me. We get to see what happened before, during, and after A Christmas Carol took place, and I loved this.
If you liked the original story as created by Dickens, I highly recommend this book as a companion piece and will be giving it to my kids to read too. I was planning on giving it 4 stars, most of the way through the book, but the end of the book cinched the last star and I would be remiss if I didn't give it all 5.
