My Christmas story is both very new and very old.
It’s new because the book, Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds, was only published on 1st November this year (sorry, only a few sample pages can be found online). It’s old because it’s inspired by (if not a faithful reworking of) the classic seasonal story, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
Cassandra Darke is also a graphic novel. Actually, novel might be pushing it a little as, at under 100 pages, it can be read in the time it would take a long short story. But it is told mostly with pictures – and wonderful ones they are too.
Cassandra herself is a curmudgeon on a par with Ebenezer Scrooge – a wealthy septuagenarian West London art gallery owner. She’s as mean towards others as Dickens's protagonist, but her solitary Sloane Square existence is considerably more indulgent – she has a cook (whom she reprimands for being “heavy handed with the dill”) and polishes off bottles of Chateau Haut Brion during weekday dinners.
Like Scrooge she doesn’t believe in philanthropy, replying “Yes, thanks,” and walking on amused at her joke when asked if she has any change by a homeless man. “It’s the job of the government, charities to get them off the street.” Consequently, she’s not impressed when Nicki, her ex-husband’s daughter, embarks on a conceptual art project based on the cardboard boxes on London streets inhabited by the homeless.
Nicki is the story’s Bob Cratchit. She lives in Cassandra’s basement in return for being Cassandra’s unpaid gofer and dog-walker. Nevertheless, Cassandra finds skint millennial artist Nicki extremely irritating, especially her burlesque art installations and noisily athletic sex life.
Like A Christmas Carol, the story is set at this festive time of year, although there is a more of a non-Christmassy backstory than in Dickens. Surprisingly gritty and brutal, this strand features a bunch of East End thugs of Bill Sikes levels of lack of goodwill to all men.
I’ve loved Posy’s cartoons since the start of her weekly strip in The Guardian, and her illustrations perfectly capture the tense bonhomie of the Oxford Street crush – buses becalmed in traffic jams and shop windows shimmering out of the gloom.
Perhaps it’s a self-critical writer’s jealousy of an expert in another form, but I’m in awe of Posy’s ability to instantly convey pathos by sketching a couple of lines of shading under an eye or communicate a character’s untrustworthiness by the way he folds his arms.
Posy’s sly eye for detail is best known for subtle but telling satire on the habits and hypocrisies of the Islington classes. But in Cassandra Darke she’s as lacerating as Dickens about social inequality and the plight of the dispossessed, as well as being topical. The closest equivalent to Tiny Tim is a trafficked Romanian sex worker.
It won’t be a spoiler to say that Nicki’s travails lead Cassandra to reflect on her own selfish past, of dishonestly fleecing gallery customers, and she realises, like Scrooge, that perhaps her misanthropy is rooted in a life that’s been unfulfilled. Towards the end of the book she even stops by a glowing West End window to place a coin in a homeless man’s hand.
Mike Clarke has a Creative Writing MA from Manchester Metropolitan University and, when not writing filthy short stories, multi-tasks by working on a novel and writing pub reviews in the Sunday papers. He works “in media” in Soho, where he can be spotted writing while observing hipsters in trendy coffee bars (rather than bakeries). His latest story for Liars' League is the bakery-set Gluten Tolerant, which was read at Naughty & Nice on Tuesday 11th December 2018 and can be enjoyed here: Gluten Tolerant, read by Amy Neilson Smith.
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