(courtesy Scholastic Children’s Books)
It’s a big thing to say, given how thick on the ground A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, are on the ground, but Bah! Humbug! by Michael Rosen is quite simply one of the best retellings of the Christmas classic I have ever come a cross.
Rather cleverly, Rosen, a children’s author, poet, TV presenter and a million other supremely talented things, has chosen not to do an exact retelling of the well-known story; rather his narrative, at least the one that accompanies actual text from A Christmas Carol, sits Dickens adjacent, telling the story of a dad, Ray, from poor beginnings who works too hard to ensure neither he nor his family of four including wife Lisa, son Harry and daughter Eva who is, rather Tiny Tim-like living with a chronic disease that has her in a wheelchair, and often misses key family moments.
Like Harry starring as Scrooge in his school’s end-of-year performance of A Christmas Carol, into which Harry has put considerable time and effort, learning the lines with Eva as his practice partner, and which means the world to the talented young boy.
While Ray reluctantly goes along to see the play – he has a deal pending with a supplier or customer in Mumbai and can’t leave his more than able friend and colleague François to do it for him – his mind is elsewhere, and so, barely has the play begun that he is dashing out of the hall, his priorities with his business rather than his son who really wants his dad to see him perform.
And why wasn’t he at the show? The course of the evening’s events flashed in front of him in a split second and he was overcome with a sense of things slipping between his fingers. He snapped the laptop shut, jumped up and ran to the car.
The laptop sat, flat and quiet, on Ray’s desk.
As Rosen notes in the video below, Ray is not Scrooge but he is a man who, for some profoundly understandable reasons – the author takes care in the narrative segments that alternate with actual dialogue from A Christmas Carol which is performed in real time in parallel with what’s happening with Ray and the family – has lost sight of what really matters.
And while he misses most of the play, and thus the obvious messaging, events that take place in his dash to his place of work in the business park, and later at home when he’s searching for an errant laptop, deliver an epiphany that has him realising that all of his hard work and financial success is worth nothing without his amazing wife and gorgeous kids.
Delivered with astoundingly moving empathy and a vibrancy of writing that brings both the play and the familial events surrounding it to immersively compelling life, Bah! Humbug! is a sweet and moving joy that adds a worthwhile adaptation to the many inspired by Dickens’ mid-nineteenth century work.
With playful illustrations by Tony Ross that also convey a feat depth of meaning and emotion, Bah! Humbug! is full to the brim with raw humanity, and a moving sense that, whether it’s Christmas or any other time of the year, that none of our hard work or success is worth anything without the close and meaningful company and interaction of family and friends and that if we take anything away from A Christmas Carol, and there’s a great deal to learn from it, of course, it’s that we need people and we need them close for anything else we do to matter at all.