A Christmas Carol
By: Charles Dickens / Narrated By: Simon Vance
Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
You know the story, but oh! What wonderful narration!!!
We all know the story of Scrooge, his avarice, his redemption. We know and love it as he’s warned by his old dead friend, Marley, that his soul is bound for eternal wandering and helplessness, as he’s told he has but three chances through three visits to save his very soul and to start living a life worth something.
But have you ever heard A Christmas Carol this way, by the inimitable Simon Vance? Truly, it’s a wonder. I listen to it every year, and it never fails to bring me into the spirit of the season (and you simply MUST follow it with Simon Vance’s delivery of Jacob T. Marley!!!)
Only Vance can make Scrooge such a, well, Scrooge at the beginning of the book with his, “Bah! Humbug!”s. With his vilification of all things festive, with his declarations that the poor would do better to die and decrease the surplus population posthaste.
But then we get to Christmas Past, and we hear the joy of long past wondrous memories, of past grief, of love lost. Vance’s voice rises with excitement, cracks with sorrow, wanders with the wish that perhaps he should’ve treated that young boy caroling outside his door better. Christmas Past really sets it all up for the rest of Scrooge’s transformation. We see that maybe there was a heart in the man after all, that perhaps past suffering had something to do with the hardening of that heart (and Dickens himself worked horribly long hours in wretched conditions when he was but a twelve-year old boy, helping to pay off his father’s debts. The man knew what he was writing about).
Christmas Present brings the excitement of parties that he wishes to join, and which he does indeed join though none can hear or see him. He shouts answers to games played at his nephew’s Christmas dinner party; he humbly accepts the honor of a toast made to him, in jest, but made to him at any rate. He sees how his clerk and his clerk’s family get along, a large family, impoverished but filled with love for each other, love for the season. And finally, his own words are thrown back at him when the ghost introduces him to the scrawny and near feral children, Ignorance and Want.
Vance brings the utter creepiness of the voiceless ghost of Christmas Yet To Come to us. He shows us Scrooge’s fear and desperation, his sadness. His earnest declarations to do better, to not be the individual who is jeered about when dead.
And finally, we hear the schoolboy giddiness of a Scrooge merry as can be, planning gifts and honors, bestowing coins aplenty, buying the turkey that’s twice the size of Tiny Tim.
Seriously, we all know the story, but Simon Vance’s sublime narration really brings the dirt and filth, the “misanthropic ice” to life, followed by the holly in the shops, the beauty of a festive fall of snow. I also have Tim Curry’s “Signature Performance” narration of the book, but he can’t hold a candle to Vance.
I highly recommend this version to any and all in the mood for this tale of redemption, this tale of a curmudgeonly old miser turned jolly, hopeful old man. God Bless us, everyone!
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