10 Cracking reads for Christmas
PENNING the denouement to her dear friend Vanessa Lafaye’s last book, Miss Marley, was bittersweet for fellow author Rebecca Mascull.
Vanessa – who shared a passion for Charles Dickens, particularly A Christmas Carol, with Rebecca – had dreamed of writing a prequel to the tale and publishing it in time for this Christmas.
But it was a labour of love she was not to finish. Vanessa lost her battle with cancer on February 28.
Publisher HarperCollins asked Rebecca to step in and fulfil her friend’s wish.
Though profoundly saddened, she says she was honoured to take up the mantle and finish the final third of the 30,000-word novella.
Rebecca tells iN10: “I loved working on the book and I think Vanessa would be pleased.
“We both took the craft of writing seriously and adored Dickens, especially A Christmas Carol. She was as obsessed as I was. It was one of things that first bonded us.
“Vanessa had said she had often wondered about Jacob Marley and what he had done to deserve his fate. He intrigued her, being the one on who the whole tale seems to hang.”
Rebecca adds: “The first time I spoke to Vanessa I knew she had breast cancer. She was very open about it. She wrote a blog, Living While Dying, which was absolutely heartbreaking but brilliant.”
She was also harbouring the idea for Miss Marley which she shared with HarperCollins’ Kate Mills.
“Kate liked the idea and gave Vanessa a book deal. She was over the moon but knew she was dying at that point.
“However it was a novella and short, so she was very confident she would get it finished and she was writing like a demon.
“She went on a trip of a lifetime around Australia and New Zealand, writing from there. She was messaging me, asking about A Christmas Carol – like how old was Scrooge when he got engaged.
“She said it was going really well. Then, on February 23, she messaged to say she had another idea she wanted to discuss.
“But she died a few days later. We never got to have that conversation. I couldn’t believe it. She had been so full of life and full of the book.
“When Kate asked if I’d finish Vanessa’s book, I was blown away.
“As soon as I said yes, I started to think, ‘Oh, my God’ – the sadness of whole situation was overwhelming.”
The writer met with the publishers and it became clear no one knew how Vanessa wanted her tale to end.
“She was an obsessive planner. She had vision in her head of how she wanted to finish it, but this time she hadn’t written that down.
“So I sat down one day and I read it and covered it in notes.
“When I got to the end I just wrote down what I thought should happen. I wrote from my feeling of where I felt where the story should go. HarperCollins felt that worked.”
Rebecca penned the final 10,000 words in five days. The words came easily, almost as if Vanessa was guiding her hand.
She reveals: “It just kind of flowed through me. There were moments I wasn’t looking at the screen, I was just looking at my fingers like I was channelling it. I am not a believer in the supernatural but it was a very strange experience.”
“It’s impossible to know if Vanessa would have been pleased with what I have written,” she confesses.
“But my gut says she would be thrilled that someone who loved Dickens as she did, and loved her, was able to give that helping hand.
“It is her story and her book, I just helped her out a bit at the end.”
The story follows orphans Clara and Jacob Marley who live by their wits, scavenging for scraps in the shadow of a London workhouse. Every night, Jake promises his little sister, “Tomorrow will be better.” When the chance to escape poverty comes, he seizes it despite the terrible price.
And so Jacob Marley is set on a path that leads to his infamous partnership with Ebenezer Scrooge.
“It’s about living your life to the utmost and being a good person and being a good friend - all the things that Vanessa was,” Rebecca says. “And that is why it was so poignant. It was her last work and it is so life affirming, just as A Christmas Carol is. It is about endings and beginnings and change and transformation.
“It couldn’t be more perfect.”