THE GLOBE AND MAIL,
Saturday, December 17, 2005 Page D4
The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories
Edited by Alberto Manguel
Viking
335 pages, $32
Viking
Reviewed by T.
F. Rigelhof
Don’t buy a single
copy of The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories -- get at least two. If
you purchase only one as a gift, you’ll want to borrow it back
immediately, and if you keep it for yourself, you’ll loan it out and
might never get it back because it’s the kind of book that readers
instinctively want to share with one another. There are a couple of dozen
compelling reasons why this is so and at least one is utterly magical.
In his Introduction to this
remarkably grown-up anthology, Alberto Manguel writes
of the mythic, historical and psychological underpinnings of Christmas with
economy and insight. Beginning from the fact that we “advance in age
toward the promised six feet of earth, not along the straight path recommended
by the preacher but in a sequence of identical loops that carry us, year after
year, from the illusion of beginning to the illusion of end,” Manguel reminds us that “the celebratory mood of
December was already well established . . . long before the birth of
Christ” -- by the Romans, the Celts and, pre-eminently, the ancient
Persians. The latter “honoured the birth of the goddess Mithra, Sun of Righteousness, by carousing and parading on
December 25.”
The Christian Church
“cared little for calendars, fixed holidays, and appointed sacred feasts,
since the only date that mattered was Christ’s Second Coming”
through its first centuries. It officially recognized a specific date for
Christ’s birthday only in 354 and established its own holy day to compete
with pagan festivities. The rebirth of the world at the winter solstice and the
birth of the Christian Saviour have hung in uneasy balance ever since, as mania
and memory vie for supremacy over hearts and minds poised between endings and
beginnings, expectation and uncertainty, rejoicing and despair.
The 23 authors of the tales
contained in The Penguin Book of Christmas Stories share Alberto Manguel’s sense of the occasion and “take for
granted the myriad connotations that the mention of Christmas evokes.” In
each of these seasonal tales, something is “hoped for, or feared, or
happily awaited, something whose quality remains mysterious . . . because the
change that is to come, for all its certainty, gives no indication of its
nature. All we know is that darkness will be followed by light.”
The common element and
universal strength in an alphabet of storytellers that begins with Paul Auster and ends with Jeanette Winterson,
is that they repeat this very old story with brilliant variations. Christmas
Stories includes a smattering of familiar and much-loved pieces: Truman
Capote’s A Christmas Memory, John Cheever’s
Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor, Graham Greene’s A Visit
to Morin and Vladimir Nabokov’s Christmas.
Alongside them are writers virtually unknown in English: the political activist
Siegfried Lenz from
Canadian stories well known
from their original collections -- Mavis Gallant’s The Sunday After
Christmas, Alistair MacLeod’s Winter Dog and Alice
Munro’s The Turkey Season -- glitter and gleam in fresh company:
Munro’s memoir-like recounting of a 14-year-old girl’s discovery of
sexual tensions and secrets while learning to gut turkeys in wartime rural
Ontario feels every bit as contemporary as Australian Peter Goldsworthy’s
2004 account of what happens when a divorced father gives his highly moral
teenage daughter a second-hand camcorder for Christmas in Run Silent, Run
Deep.
Goldsworthy’s story
and Ann Beattie’s Horatio’s Trick, Richard Ford’s Creche, Paul Auster’s
Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story and
Jeanette Winterson’s O’Brien’s
First Christmas are all tales the avuncular will want to thrust into the
hands of adolescents whose families are split into isolated and self-isolating
factions at Christmastime.
But The Penguin Book of
Christmas Stories is essentially adult entertainment. Only Ford is sexually
explicit and only Munro’s turkeys get gutted, but all the stories
deliberately echo the “pleasant thought” from Robert Louis
Stevenson’s A Christmas Sermon that comes near the end of Manguel’s Introduction: “There is indeed one
element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever
else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate
allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent
of living well.”
As Manguel
declares, “The best stories have no ending but continue beyond the page
into the reader’s own world.” Nowhere is this better displayed than
in Jane Gardam’s The Zoo at Christmas --
the best reason for owning this limitlessly rewarding collection; it’s an
utterly magical account of what happens at a zoo when the animals get wind of
“this legend of Thomas Hardy’s that
animals -- particularly oxen, who are the elect -- are wont to kneel before
their Creator on Christmas Eve.” It is a story even more brilliant in
execution than conception, the gem of this or any other anthology.
Contributing reviewer T.
F. Rigelhof is currently at work on a follow-up to
This Is Our Writing, essays on the current state of CanLit.