I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Jon Clinch can tell a story! I read this one at Christmas time, and it did not disappoint. It's a fresh take on A Christmas Carol, and a definite page turner for me.

I'm currently clearing out all of the books that were published in 2019-20 from my title feedback view!

2.5 stars rounded upward.

My thanks go to Net Galley and Atria Books for the review copy of Marley, a retelling of the Dickens classic told from a different point of view. This book is for sale now.

This work of historical fiction took off with a bang, and then fizzled.

I have not read any of Clinch’s earlier work, and at the outset of this novel, I am electrified by his prose. I love a good word smith, and Clinch’s facility with figurative language is impressive as hell. I was ready for a good Christmas book, and the October release date was right on the money. I snuggled beneath my favorite fleece blanket and immersed myself, savoring the clever phrasing and rereading parts of it before moving on.

There are two aspects of this work that hold it back; one is a quibble, but one worth mentioning, and the other is more significant. The quibble is that so much of the story isn’t about Marley. We know about Scrooge. If the author wants to write about Scrooge from a different angle, then the book’s title should reflect it. Instead, Marley’s effort at winning Scrooge’s sister Fan pulls us back into the Scrooge family, and there we stay for long stretches of the book. I echo other reviewers in asking, “But what about Marley?”

My larger objection, one that took awhile to gel as I read and ultimately prevents my recommending this book, is that the entire premise, the sacred message imparted by Dickens, is ground beneath Clinch’s authorly heel as he reframes Marley as a forger, smuggler, and criminal of the highest order. Dickens, in writing the original story, took pains to demonstrate that it is possible to be a “sound man of business,” to function entirely within the letter of the law, and still be morally bankrupt. A Christmas Carol was written to let readers know that those that succeed in legally building fortunes may nevertheless be damned if they are unwilling to extend themselves, whether through private charity or humane governmental programs. Scrooge made a point of telling his nephew that he pays his taxes, after all, and that’s the end of it.

In painting Marley as a man that brings money into the partnership through a multitude of illegal practices, Clinch not only ignores Dickens’s timeless moral and social message, but torches it, leaving only so much ash and cinder.

The chains that bind Marley in the afterlife reflect the chains of human bondage in his corporal one, as he invests the assets of Scrooge and Marley in slave ships, is a lovely literary device. I wish the author had found a way to use it without laying waste to the heart and soul of a timeless classic whose message is needed more today than ever.

Not recommended.

*I received this copy via Netgalley from the publisher in exchange for an honest review”
I found this book to be hard to get into and follow at first. It is definitely not your typical “holiday read” (think warm and fuzzy). However as I kept going I didn’t want to stop. I enjoyed how Clinch was able to come up with a back story to certain things we see in A Christmas Carol. Like how did Marley die? What happened to Scrooge’s sister? How did Scrooge and Marley meet? Overall I found the concept to be fun, and if you’re into prequel retellings you’ll enjoy this.

An excellent piece of literate historical fiction that stands on its own notwithstanding it is a prequel of sorts to DIcken’s A Christmas Carol. Featuring Marley and Scrooge and their families , loves, lives and business dealings set in the early 188’s in London—this is a moving exploration of the relationship between Marley and Scrooge. Oddly moving its just a damn good story and well worth your time. I will be looking for Clinch”s other books.

Published by Atria Books on October 8, 2019

Thanks to Charles Dickens, the name Scrooge is synonymous with a certain crusty bitterness, a coldness of heart and lack of generosity. Thanks to Jon Clinch, we learn that Ebenezer Scrooge was once a different man. Clinch explains how Scrooge became the heartless miser who merited a life-changing visit by Christmas ghosts.

In Clinch’s expansion of the story Dickens told in A Christmas Carol, we learn how young Bob Cratchit meets Scrooge, but the bulk of the story fills in the details of Scrooge’s partnership with Jacob Marley. Scrooge & Marley is in the business of transportation. Scrooge keeps the books, both real and fictitious, and lives for the music played by the numbers he records. Marley handles transactions, some legitimate (rum), some unsavory (slaves), and some illegal. Scrooge is aware and approves of Marley’s tendency toward fraud, but he doesn’t know the half of it.

Marley is written in modern prose, but the names that Marley invents for fictitious people and businesses — Krook & Flite, Squeers & Trotter, Inspector Bucket — are worthy of Dickens. Scrooge is depicted in his youth as a man who would rather tend to his accounts than attend a Christmas party. He has no time for pleasure, including keeping company with Belle, the only woman who cares about him. Yet at this time in his life, Scrooge is capable of love, or at least of appreciating Belle’s kindness and generosity. Belle’s father is reluctant to give Belle’s hand in marriage, however, because he has doubts about Scrooge’s character, largely related to Scrooge’s involvement in the slave trade. Scrooge resolves to make whatever changes are necessary to win Belle’s hand — a decidedly unselfish act that prompts a schism between Scrooge and his business partner.

Scrooge’s sister Fan is Belle’s best friend. While Fan’s mother thinks she would be a good match for Marley, Fan sees Marley for what he is, much to Marley’s consternation. Clinch imagines Marley as a charming but murderous rogue, a con-man whose people skills complement Scrooge’s talent with numbers. Yet Marley is more than willing to betray Scrooge if his partner’s newfound aversion to the slave trade will stand in the way of wealth acquisition.

Marley, of course, is a ghost by the time A Christmas Carol is told. Perhaps Clinch reimagines the chains Marley drags in Dickens’ story as the chains that bound the slaves he transported. Dickens made clear that the chains are related to Marley’s pursuit of wealth while alive, but if Marley was in the slave trade, it is easy to picture the chains as a fitting punishment for his earthly crimes.

Clinch deftly incorporates some of the melodrama that makes Dickens memorable, but does so in an understated style that is more suited to modern fiction. While the straightforward plot teaches lessons a reader might take from a Dickens story, the lessons are appropriately subdued. There are no ghosts of past and future, although Marley does have a premonition of the wronged souls he might encounter in his afterlife.

Just as A Christmas Carol ends on a hopeful note, suggesting that it is never too late to change for the better, Marley suggests the possibility of redemption at the end of a misspent life. Yet the novel also suggests that redemption comes only to those who choose it. Perhaps, as Marley tells Scrooge late in his life, there is no justice, but Marley is not in a position to ask for it. Perhaps the ledgers of which Scrooge is so fond, when applied to Marley, will never balance. The man’s efforts at decency, particularly with regard to Fan, are inevitably undercut by his self-interest. The little good he does and the questionable remorse he professes surely cannot compensate for the evil he has done.

And that, the reader will come to understand, is why Dickens envisioned justice for Marley as an eternity of tormented wandering. Clinch’s novel ultimately takes the lessons of the Dickens story and inverts them, illustrating the lesson that a chance of redemption is only a chance. It is up to the person who is given that chance to decide whether to seize it. Clinch illustrates that lesson with convincing characterizations and an imaginative plot, giving readers a better understanding of a classic story.

RECOMMENDED

Much of this Christmas Carol prequel reads like it should have always been a part of the story- Clinch has clearly studied Dickens well in the ways he names people and places. The author has laid out a clear path of what led Scrooge to be the character we meet at the beginning of the classic, and the way he fleshes out Marley really sets up the story in an intriguing, and frankly, unexpected way.

Jacob Marley and Ebenezer Scrooge meet as boys at the gloomy Drabb's Academy for Boys. Marley has a keen talent for trickery, deceit and all things dishonest and Scrooge is magical with numbers. So, of course, they go into business together. But it's all based on the slave trade, side-stepping the law, and trickery. But two men with very little moral fiber are going to come to odds sooner or later....and when Scrooge and Marley have a falling out, it is definitely epic.

A Christmas Carol has been my favorite book since childhood. I own several well-read copies, plus several movie versions and a few re-tellings/re-visits. So of course when I saw this book available for review, I jumped right on it. I'm always up for a little visit with Ebenezer and Marley. This time Marley was definitely not dead as a doornail....but he was definitely a scheming, evil little man! Ebenezer isn't much better. I enjoyed this revamp of Dickens story and characters. A little update....a dash more evil intent....and a little added violence. Nicely done!

This is the first book by Jon Clinch that I've read. I'm definitely interested in reading his re-telling of the Tom Sawyer story, Finn. I hope it is as good as Marley!! I love the front cover...the chains are a perfect fit to the story!

Definitely an enjoyable read! I think Dickens would approve.

**I voluntarily read a review copy of this book from Atria Books via NetGalley. All opinions expressed are entirely my own.**

Two Christmases ago, I listened to another book that strove to fill in the blanks of Ebenezer Scrooge's damned partner, Jacob Marley. I delighted in listening to it, and so when I spotted this one, I was quite excited to see what another author would do with this same starting point.

Clinch certainly evokes a certain Dickensian essence with this writing style here that suits the story quite nicely. It is well-written from that standpoint, and I think that it will satisfy those Dickens fans that stumble across this title. But though the story takes Scrooge and Marley from their first meeting at a grim boarding school for boys, it doesn't really fill in quite as many blanks as I would have expected regarding Marley himself. His early childhood is entirely missing, and though the rumors about his origins are cultivated by the man himself, he remains a mysterious creature throughout the book, despite being its titular character.

Marley hones his nefarious talents for forgery and fraud within the confines of the boarding school, but for the most part, motivations more complex than greed are left to the reader's own guesses. Scrooge's downfall is more meticulously examined here - and the start of his relationship with Bob Cratchitt makes for a surprising inclusion. The failed romances across the novel adds to the generally dour air of the whole book. I guess, despite knowing the ending, I still expected a bit more Yuletide cheer and hope, Instead, it is all implied to be found within A Christmas Carol itself.

Overall, I wish that this had included a bit more redemption and hope - along with more detail on Marley himself. I think that Clinch does an amazing job with the financials of it all, and just how the fraud led to fortunes, and while there were some surprises in the storyline, I just didn't find myself ever really enjoying it as much as I had hoped to, It's a sad book, but certainly would make for a good choice for book clubs - especially as the holiday season approaches. I think it is definitely a discussion starter!

*3.5 stars rounded up. I thought this was an intriguing novel, an imagining of what Marley and Scrooge were like BEFORE our beloved story, A Christmas Carol. How did they make their money, for instance? Just what were Marley's despicable sins that formed his heavy chains after death? They may be worse than you had ever thought. Author Jon Clinch comes up with some nasty scenarios. I couldn't help but think of Mr Hyde (Dr Jekyll's alter ego) as I read. Two of a kind. Yet Marley does seem to have a heart because it can break...or is it just wounded male pride? And as we anticipated all along, Marley does get his just deserts in the end.

Thank you to the publisher for providing me with an arc of this novel via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks!

Ebenezer Scrooge’s Jacob Marley is very much alive in this Dickensian reimagining–-the two meet at boarding school, where Marley’s already adept at extortion and ferreting out weaknesses. As men, they form a partnership: Scrooge handles the “innocent sums,” Marley, the unsavory deals. But Scrooge insists they divest of their profitable slave trade and uncovers Marley’s deceit. Masterful.

In Marley, Jon Clinch resurrects one of Dicken’s most famous dead people, giving us the back story of Jacob Marley as well as offering up a reason why Ebenezer Scrooge was, well, Scrooge. As always, Clinch’s writing is superb, the characterization sharp, but the story as a whole felt surprisingly flat and distant.

In Clinch’s version of this tale, Marley and Scrooge meet at a horrid all-boys school, where Marley, already well-versed in deceit, forgery, and self-interest ensnares Scrooge into first financial obligation and, years later, the partnership we know a little of from A Christmas Carol. Clinch fills in the gaps, showing how their financial success is built upon three elements: the slave trade, Scrooge’s obsessive skill with numbers, and Marley’s con artistry. Scrooge knows little of that last, certainly not the extent of it nor the way it is turned against him as well, but he is complicit in the slave trade. The Scrooge who refers to the slaves as “cargo,” and separates himself from the act by saying he deals in “innocent sums” while Marley handles the “complexities” is a familiar character to readers. But Clinch flips the script on us, for Scrooge’s fondness (perhaps even love) for his sister’s friend Belle motivates him to shed his association with slavery (Belle’s father refuses to allow him to court her as a man who profits from slavery) despite the financial cost. It is, in fact, that cost that drives him to spend ever more time at work trying to raise himself to a monetary and moral position that will allow him to marry her.

As one might expect, Marley cares nothing for the moral question of slavery, nor is he willing to have Scrooge’s sudden conscience cost him a pound, and eventually the two, while remaining partners on the surface, become adversaries. Clinch has more surprises in store (including a potential match between Marley and Scrooge’s sister Fan), but I won’t say much about them so as to avoid spoilers save that some are more successful than others.

The plot is interesting, but I can’t say it’s particularly compelling, and it suffers a bit from a “first this then that then that” feel to it. Some of the character development seems abrupt or unearned, and of course, there’s always the difficulty in these sorts of stories of being constrained by the original material (for instance, we all know Fan and Marley do not end up together).

The writing, on the other hand, is excellent. Sharp, vivid, fluid, atmospheric, and nicely wry in places. Clinch has a lot of fun with winks and nods to the source material, as when he writes that, “The two have been shackled together in business for exactly eight years now” or “should they be laid out side by side upon a mortuary table, measured for their shrouds,” or most directly, “if madam you are, and not some evil spirit abroad on Christmas Eve.”

As noted, Marley didn’t wholly satisfy (particularly the close), but it’s a well-written, easy to read tale that casts an intriguing and original light (or shadow) on some of literatures favorite characters. 3.5 stars

Clinch's writing is ALMOST more enjoyable than his story. Almost, I said. Actually, a pleasure all around. And although I know these characters were adapted from Dickens, they could as well not have been. They felt that original and fully developed.

I requested this book via Netgalley because, as is true for so many others around the world, I am a great fan of Dickens' Christmas Carol and a good many of the spin off versions thereof. In fact this month I have read no less than three new versions and watched others on television.
I was excited about the premise of learning more about the mysterious Marley. Add to that the idea of Scrooge and Marley making much of their money from the abominable trade of delivering slaves and my interest was piqued.
This is a case where I wish I could give additional partial stars, as I was satisfied to go a full four, but three sounds as if I only found the book tolerable. The writing was quite skillful and as stated before, the premise is original and interesting. The first half of the book just did not deliver the punch I hoped for.

While we did learn a few of Marley's secrets, far more of the book was devoted to Scrooge and his family. We learn that Marley was a rotten person, even onto Scrooge, from the beginning. Scrooge is seen in a far more compassionate light. Not that anyone is going to feel soft hearted toward either character for any length of time.

Overall the book is a portrait of difficult and dark times, of deceit and manipulation.
In the Dickens original we are all delighted to have Scrooge awaken to an enlightening and willing to take a second chance. In Marley, Jon Clinch attempts to offer Marley his own awakening and change of heart before his immortal soul is judged for all time. Neither Scrooge nor I was convinced.