Tell me if this sounds familiar: Young Alice is sitting by a river with her sister bored out of her skull, when a pink-eyed rabbit runs by in a waistcoat, nervously looking at his pocket watch and declaring "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!". The rabbit disappears down a hole and Alice follows him, finding that it's not just a normal hole. It is the gateway to Wonderland!
The thing about Alice in Wonderland is that, like many literary works in our culture, like The Holy Bible, Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet, or even more recently, Twilight or Harry Potter, you can be aware of the story, the themes, and main characters without ever having read the work itself. This is especially true now, with all the additional media we have like movies, comics, toys, tv shows, videogames, and in some cases, breakfast cereals. Literary characters are marketed just like anything else. That's the roundabout way I came to reading these two books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll.
I have to admit I've never watched any of the movie or tv adaptations of Alice before, or ever tried reading the books. Of course I knew a lot of the characters and basic plot. Who doesn't? Also, being a huge Beatles fan, I knew that John Lennon had referenced Carroll in "I am the Walrus" and that he was a big fan of the books. It finally took a videogame, Alice Madness Returns, to get me curious enough to check out the novels.
One of the misconceptions I had about these books going in was that Alice's main goal, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, was to get back home to her world. Nothing could be further from the truth. Alice doesn't want to go home. Wonderland is far more interesting than the real world. In fact, these two books remind me a little of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Alice is just passing through the different lands, chilling with the characters, and just being intrigued with the different manners of thinking and speech patterns. There are a lot of word and logic games going on in the books and Alice rises to the challenge. In fact, there's a lot of times where Alice says to herself "I'm not going to let these creatures make fun of me. I'm gonna outsmart them!" It is so refreshing to see a kid become not exactly a hero, but a take-charge strong character. Alice doesn't whine, she's not spoiled, she's not a jackass. She's just soaking everything up. I can see why hippies back in the 1960s dug this book so much. Wonderland seems dreamed up by a hallucinogenic, with the LSD-like transcendence of boring trappings that we call reality being turned on their heads and tails at the same time in multiple different dimensions.
The Alice Madness Returns game was Gothic in its sensibilities and steampunk in its aesthetics with buckets of blood and horror. In contrast, Carroll's overriding obsession is with play. Playfulness, jokes, laughter, smartassing, sarcasm, word reversal, thought reversal and inversion, inside outs, coming out of wormhole brain pops, smiles, but in the end, PLAY. There was also a lot of implied thought that your mind should be always be forging ahead to new ideas even without knowing exactly where your thoughts are leading you to. One of my favorite passages from the first book is an exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat:
"Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here? I don't much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as a explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
To me this sequence just sums up the freedom of the books, the experimentation, and also the mindset you need to have if you plan on reading them. I'll definitely have to read these books again someday.
Be sure whatever edition of Alice you get includes the awesome original illustrations by John Tenniel. The edition I read was an old Bantam Classic that I picked up at Half Price Books for $1! Lots of e-readers have Alice for free because its public domain, but I can't really speak to the quality of them.
My Grade: B+
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