Christmas approaches, and with it the biting wind and short-lived, sharp light of mid-winter. Panic and crazed shopping unfortunately take over despite the better intentions of various productions of Messiah and the brave efforts of the carol singers who continue to personify the true, if often obscured, spirit of the season - and all in a country with little guarantee of that supreme festive accessory, snow.
Harry Potter and the forthcoming dramatically sophisticated version of the first book of The Lord of the Rings will battle for supremacy in the cinemas, but both might temporarily yield centre stage to a robustly enduring 19th-century bestseller without a hero. It is a cautionary, gloriously atmospheric tale that continues to entertain the public - and attract scriptwriters and directors ever on the search for something special or, better still, road tested.
Dublin theatre-goers are already enjoying the welcome return of John Mortimer's wonderful adaptation of A Christmas Carol at the Gate, while an animated film, Christmas Carol - the Movie released this week takes the same story, injects it with some unexpected romance - no wonder Dickens, played by Simon Callow, concludes his narrative by saying: "It's not quite the story as I wrote it" - and includes a pop song sung by a heroine who is but a minor player in the original and seems set to dominate the end-of-year charts.
Dickens, the showman with a moralist's heart, remains all things to most men and survives the years with a resilience shared by only the finest of products - as his books and Shakespeare's plays continue to prove.
An ageing, embittered man has set himself apart from his fellows through his sour behaviour and notorious parsimony. No one loves him, no one even likes him, beggars avoid him and he spreads a chilly gloom wherever he goes. At no time is his lack of humanity more obvious than at the universally forgiving time of Yuletide, when most arguments are mended. Just when it seems he is unredeemable, damned by the mean existence he has chosen, intervention comes in the unlikely form of a visit from his dead business partner, himself doomed to eternal misery and regret.
Now plagued by remorse for his failings in life, the ghost of Jacob Marley is intent on saving the living half of the firm, Scrooge and Marley, from a similar fate. A Christmas Carol remains both story and moral odyssey, an excursion into the past, present and always terrifying future with an outcome elevated by hope. Through Scrooge's experiences, we see the error of our own ways and are free to engage in glorious sentimentality. Old Ebenezer represents the worst of ourselves and, eventually, the best of us as well. Through him we begin to understand how we all start out full of promise but get damaged by life along the way. Appalling as he is, the cantankerous grump - who rejects his nephew's Christmas invitation with the famous rebuff: "Every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart" - is moved when presented with images of his unhappy boy self and certainly expresses joy on seeing his former employer, old Fezziwig, a man who knew how to celebrate Christmas.
Dickens had been shaped by the dual impact of being a gentleman's son who saw his father banished to a debtor's prison and himself working in a boot-blacking factory at 12, and had tasted the horrors of poverty. Even when the court reporter- turned-bestseller author knew fame, he never forgot his early experiences; and these, combined with his frenetic personality and desperate need for adulation that drove him to perform exhausting tours of his work, as well as his complicated personal life, eventually killed him, aged 58, with The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished.
Published on December 17th, 1843 when Dickens was 31 and already the most successful and best-loved novelist of his day, A Christmas Carol was the first of his Christmas books. But it was not his Christmas dΘbut. He had written 'A Christmas Dinner' as an early newspaper sketch later collected in Sketches by Boz, while "the good humoured Christmas chapter" of Pickwick Papers, published in December 1836 and written when he was 24, is a classic Dickensian set piece.
Nowadays, when hype and bravado dictate our waking hours, and book publishing is a massive, market-driven business, it is interesting to remind ourselves of exactly how commercial Dickens was. He was the definitive one-man show, artist and agent, producing a large body of comic, melodramatic masterpieces populated by a huge cast of fantastic characters who simply walk off the page and continue to live through the lines he wrote for them, the appearances he gave them.
The other factor too easily forgotten as one sits with a hefty volume, re-reading it as if for the first time, and always with the pleasure of experiencing as many pages in one sitting as one chooses, is that Dickens wrote in instalments to careful word counts, and each new despatch was calculated to end on a suitably cliff-hangerish note to ensure the readers - his buyers - would be counting the days until the next ration of words bringing the narrative farther along its path would be delivered. All of which serves to reiterate the wonders of an original who broke most of the rules of composition and, perhaps, even of taste, and got away with it.
For all the often grotesque comic excess, the sickly girls, the pathos, never mind the weighty social commentary, Dickens was and remains one of literature's masters, influencing the English tradition. It was he, more than any other writer, who most shaped the finest 20th-century English novelist, Evelyn Waugh. While the 19th-century Russian novel dominates the psychological narrative, Charles Dickens presents Victorian London as a grim universe where good meets evil and is often battered but never fully defeated. His humanity eventually wins out against even the most cynical, excepting of course Oscar Wilde, who no doubt saw Tiny Tim's plight on a par with the death of Little Nell.
Mortimer's adaptation at the Gate, directed by Alan Stanford, is almost as good as the book. High praise indeed, because the book is so very good, the language so vibrant. Whatever about his showmanship, Dickens wrote with a wonderful fluency, energy and wit. The genius of A Christmas Carol lies in its tone, that of a well-intentioned storyteller who, though aware of the facts, remains in wonder of the tale. The Gate production, marked by exuberance and beautifully choreographed ensemble-playing alert to the comic nuances and asides of the text, catches that tone through the inspired use of a chorus serving as narrator cum commentator and frequent carol sequences. The show exudes the humour, energy, humanity and even traces of the righteous anger of the original text. Robert O'Mahoney is a convincing Scrooge because, as the book shows, there is more to the old miser than the grump we met at the beginning.
Dickens has created a man who epitomises the Victorian belief in money and no nonsense and, in the pursuit of wealth, has almost stifled his heart and humanity. No less an actor than George C. Scott brought Scrooge's complex repression to life in Clive Donner's otherwise pedestrian 1984 film version.
Michael Caine, co-staring with puppets in Brian Henson's fast-moving comedy The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), also caught the essential ambivalence of Scrooge as a hardened almost-but-not-quite rotten miser, far from the monster Gradgrind is in Hard Times (1854). The point is Scrooge, warped by his childhood and possessed of a draconian work ethic, believes it wrong to have to pay his employee to be idle on Christmas day.
Narrated by the Great Gonzo as Dickens, with Kermit as a suitably nervous and eager to please Bob Cratchit, the Muppet version is very funny and true enough to the text, although the casting of the two critics as Marley means his ghost becomes that of Marley and Marley who sing a spirited - and I use that word advisedly - double act. Aside from Jacob Marley becoming the Marley Brothers, the Muppet version is faithful to the text. The humour is of course not quite Dickensian with Rizzo the Rat interjecting comments such as "is this not too scary for kids?" only to be told by Gonzo/Charles Dickens, "no, it's culture".
The new animated version, directed by Jimmy T. Murakami, if more conventional in concept, takes more liberties with the original. Scrooge, voiced by Simon Callow, is a bit nicer, to the point of having a pet mouse named Ellen (after Dickens's real-life love - bah, humbug). He is also presented as something of a romantic hero.
Belle, who has but a minor role in the original as the girl Scrooge lost through his increasingly obsessive pursuit of money, is now seen in middle age as a devoted nurse working with sick children. In the novel she is happily married, having long recovered from Scrooge. But the animated version has her as a tragic heroine. Voiced by Kate Winslet, Belle reviews her former relationship with Scrooge through the gooey love song What If, currently on release.
Scrooge in love will test most purists but, Murakami says, it was the producers' idea: "they wanted Scrooge to be more sympathetic". Bah, humbug, I say to that. "The ending leaves it like maybe Belle and Scrooge get back together." More bah, humbug. Then there's the two cute mice as Scrooge's Ellen is joined by Gabriel, the mouse who lives at Belle's children's hospital. Christmas Carol - the Movie uses a stiffer style of animation than the current Disney generation. It is noticeably serious. Aside from the mice, there are no gags. The script has none of the increasingly subversive comedy that has underlined Disney productions since The Jungle Book (1967).
Some critics have denounced the hilarious scripts as pandering to adult humour. Bah, humbug to those critics. However, it could be seen as a mark of courage that the makers of Christmas Carol - the Movie have bypassed one-liners and opted for a sombre representation of Victorian London. It is charming, if somewhat flat and not ideal for the under-fives. Still, as Dickens owns Christmas, the movie will be as strong a season family draw as Santa's Kingdom.
Eleven years on from its first release, it's worth noting The Muppet Christmas Carol complete with the bewildered Michael Caine (and available on video) remains very funny and different - and who will forget Miss Piggy's powerful performance as Mrs Cratchit? With the choice of a stage show as good as the Gate production, theatre wins out over cinema. Yet, as ever, the best tip of all is to return to the book, read it aloud and experience the vivid grace of the master's prose. Should you be as cynical and as Yuletide-hating as old Scrooge once was, this could be your year to reform and discover, as he did, "how to keep Christmas well". If not, beware the ghosts of Christmas past, present and to come.
A Christmas Carol continues at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until January 19th.
Christmas Carol - the Movie will be released on December 14th