‘Marley’ brings ghost to life

“Marley was dead: to begin with.” Thus starts one of our most beloved Christmas stories, Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” But what of Marley’s life and his partnership with Ebenezer Scrooge? And what about Scrooge’s formative years? How did the two meet?

In Dickens’ classic their shared scene is in Scrooge’s bedroom, Marley’s ghost coming through the door, dragging a chain made “of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.” This is Marley’s legacy, the chain he forged in life: “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free-will, and of my own free-will I wore it.”

What type of life did Jacob Marley live to forge such a ponderous chain? Jon Clinch’s 2019 novel “Marley” masterly imagines the life of the man who created that chain. Clinch’s genius is to have Scrooge shaped from first to last by Marley. In Clinch’s late 18h century England an adolescent Scrooge meets a slightly older Marley at Professor Drabb’s Academy for Boys. Soon Scrooge is conned and paying for damage to a neighbor’s farm, vandalism Scrooge did not commit. This is not Marley’s first scheme, only his first cheating Scrooge.

Marley is sharp in every way. He sizes up Scrooge and partners with him in the firm of Scrooge and Marley. In Clinch’s telling, Scrooge is the bean counter, the numbers man, creatively keeping two sets of books, the code to decipher them his secret. “The realities they represent – casks of rum, bobs of cloth, the hides of enslaved men – are nothing to him. He cares only for their music,” finding the numbers enchanting, his obsession and his joy.

But this is Marley’s story. Marley is infinitely more interesting, his imagination taking him beyond the balance sheet and out into the wide world, not only of commerce and deal making, but pleasure, all of it conniving. Early on we find that “although Marley possesses many talents, the greatest of them is forgery.” Thus Scrooge’s schooltime crime and Marley’s mansion filled with false businesses and fake names: Squeers & Trotter, Barnacle & Sons, Honeythunder & Grimwig.

Clinch weaves his novel seamlessly from “A Christmas Carole.” We get Dickens’s London, from the fog to the grog shops to the houses of prostitution and a cemetery with its grave robbers. But the flesh and blood Marley Clinch creates is a magnificent original, set on his path of destruction, destroying lives, from his student days to finally his own death, on Christmas Eve, of course.

Clinch’s artistry paints the how and what and who of evil in action. His Marley is a magician conjuring up fake companies, fake names and ghost addresses. He wears counterfeit identities like well-tailored suits. Marley relishes his deceptions. He has no conscience, no ethics and no boundaries.

So Clinch, a 21st century American novelist considering the world’s worst sins, makes Marley a slave trader, even after England abolishes trading.

This is a fun, imaginative and fascinating read, a good book for yourself or as a gift. It misses greatness only in not revealing the why of Marley: what are his motives, who stole his heart and crushed his soul, terrifying him into the evil genius he became?

A 2019 publication, one cannot help but think of other constant cons, not only unable to tell the truth but who revel and enjoy fleecing everyone they come in contact with, pulling down and destroying all with a Midas touch that seemingly turns all to gold before each thing crumbles to dust, a fraud and a fake.

Clinch builds historical “biographies” from classics of fiction. His first novel was “Finn,” a creation of the life of Huckleberry Finn’s father.