(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Ever since Charles Dickens published his novella A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas aka A Christmas Carol in 1843, it has been adapted repeatedly (almost immediately as a play in 1844), its universally relevant truth of finding redemption in the face of an almost insurmountable and potentially ruinous mountain of misdeeds and deeply flawed humanity find a warm reception in people who want to believe Christmas is every bit as magical as we’re lead to believe.
Some obvious examples aside, such the 1951 cinematic version starring Alistair Sim, A Muppet Christmas Carol and Scrooged, most adaptations stick pretty much to the storyline set out by Dickens with very people daring to go too outside the box the classic tale.
That is until B. K. Borison dared to imagine what might happen if the Ghost of Christmas Past, who rather happily for her festive romcom with emotional heft, Good Spirits (part of the Ghosted series) looks like a handsomely rugged Irish fisherman from the early 1900s (which is when he died overboard in a storm), were to visit a young antiques store in Baltimore, Maryland and get a disconcerting dose of hilariously feisty attitude.
That’s not supposed to happen right? The deal is the ghost turns up, the Ebeneezer Scrooge of the adaptation freaks out and gets taken on a tour of their blighted past until a Damascene epiphany takes hold and the Ghost of Christmas Present can do their thing.
I’m [Harriet] so tired of people treating me like I’m dispensable, like my feelings don’t matter. That if the reality of me doesn’t line up with their expectations, I’m not worth the time or effort. All I did was suggest an idea. I didn’t … hold him hostage in the closet and demand he succumb to my whims. The entirety of my life, I’ve had to listen to people vocalize their disappointment at how I haven’t measured up.
I don’t need it from the undead, too.
That night be the script but rather entertainingly, no one told Harriet York, a sweetly, charming, funny young woman who’s had to deal with a manipulative mother, a withdrawn, compliant father, a sister who, once close, now seems to have withdrawn into sibling irrelevancy and a general sense that she doesn’t fit in, no matter what she does.
Harriet is usually meekly compliant, even going so far as to get the exact type of dress her estranged and coldly calculating mother specifies for the family’s annual Christmas ball, but when Nolan Callahan aka The Ghost of Christmas Past (TGOCP), she finds herself in quite the bolshie mood and refuses to take Nolan’s hand and get taken on a tour of her bleak and misbegotten past.
That might be because Harriet is trying to hide her dark and terrible past, or as becomes increasingly to an annoyed then bemused then intrigued Nolan, she isn’t evil at all and someone at the HQ where Nolan works – it’s a whole thing with various departments for Grim Reapers, hauntings, A Christmas Carol redemptions etc; it’s even asked in Good Spirits how Dickens got it all so right – has stuffed up.
Can that even happen? Not in Nolan’s experience but everything about Harriet suggests someone who has been much put-upon and who simply has unexpectedly found it in herself to push back and with the sort of vehement no-nonsense and snappily witty dialogue that doesn’t usually a visit by the TGOCP.
(courtesy Penguin Random House / photo © Marlayna Demond)
Harriet’s refusal to just taken Nolan’s visits on face value gives Good Spirits real verve and, dare we say it, spirit, with the novel coming alive almost immediately and barely pausing for breath in the brilliantly written 370 pages.
Good Spirits is superbly and smartly written, its premise wildly imaginative and its execution full of an emotional resonance that is achingly sad at times, boisterously combative or just truly, rawly human; this book has it all and while you will undoubtedly love the beating love story at its heart, willing a ghost and a human to find a way to be together, you will also find yourself warming to two people who have endured a great deal and simply deserve to be happy.
What is most intriguing is the link that evidently exists between Nolan and Harriet.
To say too much about that would to be to wander too far into spoiler territory and honestly Good Spirits is too good a read to know too much going in, but suffice to say, there’s a hugely compelling reason why these two people, borne a century or so apart, find themselves so comprehensively drawn to each other.
And Borrison masterfully builds clue upon clue, discovery upon discovery until you realise, with gleeful anticipation and joyous thrill, that there’s a lot more going on here than a simple soul-revealing Dickensian haunting and that maybe whatever is going on, might involve the two of them in some sort of weirdly unorthodox double reveal.
I blink up at him. No one has ever spoken about me like that before. Like I’m something to be treasured instead of something to be tossed away. Miraculous. I roll the word around on my tongue. It’s delicious. Special. My cheeks burn hot. My hands tingle. It feels like I’m freefalling through the ozone, picking up speed, the edges of me catching fire.
It’s such a cool and brilliantly clever idea and Borison absolutely runs with it, serving up a story that takes Dickens immortal tale to places you likely never saw it going and which offers up a thrillingly original take on a story that didn’t look it had too many left-of-centre twists left in its tank.
Good Spirits manages to do what few adaptations have done before and upend what this story can accomplish; yes, there is an epiphany at the end of the story but nothing like you expect and one that is in line with the audacious leaps Borison takes with the idea of ghostly visitations and what such an extraordinary thing could mean for a person’s life.
In Dickens tale it clearly means one thing in particular, but Harriet’s hunch that she’s not evil and is desperate need of redemption might be right on the money and so the question then becomes, and good lord does Borison deliver the mother of all enthrallingly brilliant answers, exactly what it is Nolan is doing in her life and what it could mean for both of them.
Good Spirits is a gem of a read, full of romantic heart, rich, raw humanity that anyone with a beating heart will find truly affecting, and the enticing idea that the future could very much rest on what happens to a person in a highly unconventional present and that it may have everything in the world to do with a past that could be deeply linked and far more romantically intense than anything the ordinary world suggests is possible, even at Christmas.