#the chimes

The Chimes, by Charles Dickens

You can tell A Christmas Carol went well for Dickens, cos he tried to repeat the effect a few more times, in his Christmas Books. The Chimes is the second one, published only a year later, but definitely suffers from what we’d now call sequelitis. This follows a similar path of a lead character – albeit one far more sympathetic from the outset than Scrooge – shown visions of the future to make him change his ways. The main differences being that this time it’s about New Year’s Day rather than Christmas, and about the virtues in looking forward instead of back. And also the quality has dropped from genuine classic to all over the map, like a studio-demanded instant sequel to a surprise hit. Which basically is what it is.

Anyway, it starts off well, with vibrant and spooky descriptions of a church and belltower that M.R. James must have found very inspirational, then turns into a tour of fat cat landlords, justices and capitalists stamping down on poor Trotty and his friends, and Trotty getting a big dream sequence of how awful they’ll end up if they believe what the scumbags say of decent poor folks, and look towards a past golden age that never was (Jeez, that sounded familiar, doesn’t it?) instead of raising the poor workers to better lives in future. In this sense it still rings totally true – all the fat cat scumbags could be writing in the papers today from their Cabinet offices.

However, Dickens has probably hit the gig here where he gets paid by the word, and sentences run on for whole pages, making them confusing as hell – there’s also a character death where he forgets to confirm who it actually is! - and it’s all topped off with an appalling “it was all a dream, now lets all sing and dance with all the good characters, who have miraculously turned up at home like in a Muppet version finale”. And the “goblins”, the voices of the Chimes themselves don’t have a memorable or even notable character the way that all the Xmas Spirits in the previous one did.

So, there are good bits, like the opening descriptions, the early fart gag, and the chilling speeches of the – well it’s hard not to say Tories, franjkly, they haven’t improved since. The message is fine and correct, but the delivery is also confusing, long-winded, and despite being two-thirds the length of A Christmas Carol, took three times as long to get through, and has no deep or interesting characters