A Christmas Carol

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Mistaken by Neil Jordan

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (Penguin Classics, PB)

A Christmas Carol is the greatest Christmas novel of all time. It is also the most popular. It hasn't been out of print since it was first published in 1843 and for many it's as much a part of Christmas as holly, mistletoe and Willy Wonka.

This is really the literary equivalent of It's A Wonderful Life - a book that will cheer you up.

Dickens composed it in his head while walking around the streets of London late at night and it was a response to the conditions of the working class in London at that time.

At the centre of A Christmas Carol is one of Dickens' greatest characters and creations, Ebenezer Scrooge. He is the ultimate miser, a penny-pinching, tight-fisted sort whose answer to any thing jolly is the 'bah! humbug'.

But on this Christmas Eve, with the fog swirling in through the icy streets and Scrooge's old partner, Marley, dead these seven years, the old miser is visited by some unearthly phantoms: Jacob Marley and then the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Yet to Come. They take him through his life and crimes and show him the error of his ways.

A Christmas Carol's sub-title is A Ghost Story of Christmas and it is a tale that you can read in a night - one of Dickens' shortest novels. It has elements of horror and despair but it's a story that ends in the best way possible. The message that even the meanest and cruellest can be redeemed.

It is one of my favourite novellas - barely 85 pages long and yet one of the most memorable and uplifting stories of all time.

If you haven't read any Dickens, A Christmas Carol is an ideal place to start as it is quite short, especially compared to much of his other novels. By the way Dickens' own favourite novel was David Copperfield but he knew even as he finished it that this story about Christmas and goodness would be greatest ever success.

Next year, 2012, marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Dickens and there are a number of events marking the occasion. In fact this Christmas there will be a lot of Dickens documentaries on TV but pride of place probably goes to a new three-part TV adaptation of Great Expectations on BBC with Ray Winstone and Gillian Anderson.

Mistaken by Neil Jordan (John Murray, PB)

Mistaken, one of the first and best novels I read this year, was awarded Irish Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards last month.

This fine novel reworks, with craft and compassion, that age-old literary device of the double. Into a gothic pot he stirs something fresh, in a thrilling tale that investigates the trickiness of duality and the reliability of memory.

Working-class Kevin Thunder lives on the northside of Dublin, his doppelganger, Gerald Spain, lives in a more affluent southside suburb. Through their childhood and teens their lives intersect as Kevin steals Gerald's thunder (and sometimes his girlfriends) when he is mistaken for him. At other times the dice rolls the other way. But it's a dangerous game and inevitably there's a price to pay for both men.

Brilliantly evoking the Dublin of the '60s and '70s, Jordan's tale twists and turns through the double lives of Thunder and Spain like a rogue strand of DNA, through schooldays, disco nights and the ghost of Bram Stoker. Mistaken is Neil Jordan's finest achievement for some time.

I met Neil Jordan last January to talk about this book and he was clearly delighted with it. Mistaken is his first novel since 2004's Shade and I would argue that it's his best. And as a sort of postscript Jordan told me that he was just nine years old when he saw his first vampire novel. It starred Bela Lugosi and the weird humming sound of the vampire from that movie stayed with him for years afterwards.