Books I never finished: The Dan Brown Inheritance

It's book of rare, though perhaps not rare enough, quality that defeats me. Even the books that I am really not enjoying I tend to worry at - a dog with a bone - until I have managed to pick all the flesh from them, read the last page, buried the remains and stretched my metaphor to breaking point.

Numbered in this very short list I remember getting almost half way through Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon before realising that its ponderousness was causing me to lose the will to live. I had no such trouble with de Bernieres' Captain Corelli's Mondolin, a book I attempted three times, never managing to get through more than about fifty pages.
I'm sure there were others, though right now I'm struggling (though not very hard) to remember them. There is however Dan Brown. I have read the first few chapters of The Da Vinci Code and, in the bookshop only, the first few pages of Angels and Demons and of The Lost Symbol. It's hard to come up with an author that I like less and harder still to sit here and explain exactly why he's so awful.
So I won't.
Instead I'll give you a couple of links that do it far more savagely and efficiently than I ever could.

First there is this marvelous bit of sarcasm from Steven Poole.

Then there is this excellent top twenty worst bits of Dan Brown.

Doing well...

I've been considering literary adaptations. I don't mean adapting a book into a comic or a comic into a film or a film into a book or any of the other possible combinations of media. Nor do I mean translations from one language into another, though that, as with the other possibilities would also be an interesting area of discussion.
No, I mean adapting a book into another book in the same language – perhaps for a younger readership. In essence I'm talking about taking a published work and just rewriting it. Exactly the same story in new words.
You are puzzled. You are (unless you are John whose area of expertise it is) thinking, "what about copyright?" Well copyrights expire. Trust me, there are adapted versions of books out there.
Specifically I have been thinking about a recent addition to my Alice In Wonderland collection. I saw it in the bookshop. Recognised from the cover that it was a version I didn't own, skimmed through to check the illustrations and found that they were also not in my collection and handed over the paltry sum required to purchase it. What I didn't do, until I got home, was look at the text. Why should I? I can recite great chunks of it from memory. I've read the book hundreds of times.
So, there I was at home, book in hand, open at the first page and what did I see?
Well I didn't see this.

"Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, `and what is the use of a book,' thought Alice `without pictures or conversation?'
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her."

Instead, I saw this.

"Oh what a hot day it was. And what a most curious day it would turn out to be for young Alice. She and her sister had just finished a picnic by the pond in the meadow. They were sitting in the shade of a great oak tree.
Alice suddenly felt very sleepy. She yawned and wondered what to do next. She looked over to a grassy bank by the hedge. It was covered in daisies.
'I wonder,' she thought, lazily, "if the pleasure of making a daisy chain is worth all the effort of getting up and picking the daisies.'"

It was clear that this was an adaptation. A look at the cover revealed it to be "Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: a new adaptation by Archie Oliver." Illustrations were by Andrew Hopgood.

I'd like to just consider these two opening paragraphs, though the whole book is similarly adapted. Additionally I'll add two more opening versions from my extensive collection. The first is Carroll's own adaptation for young readers – The Nursery Alice.

"Once upon a time there was a little girl called Alice: and she had a very curious dream. Would you like to hear what she dreamed about?
Well, this was the first thing that happened. A White Rabbit came running by in a great hurry; and just as it passed Alice, it stopped, and took its watch out of its pocket."

The other one is a curiosity. It's from a book called Starshine Favourite Tales which is illustrated by Carlos Busquets but which credits neither the author who has adapted it nor Lewis Carroll anywhere in the volume.

"One beautiful, summer's day, Alice and her older sister, Anna, were spending the afternoon in the country. Anna was reading a book but Alice was beginning to feel bored when she suddenly saw a White Rabbit go racing by. He was a very strange sight, with his top hat and tails and his little briefcase."

What I find most curious about these versions, the Nursery Alice excluded, is not what they have left out in the adaptation but what they have added. The Archie Oliver version, for example, has added a tree (presumably by comparison with Disney rather than Carroll), added the fact that it's an oak, introduced a meadow and a picnic and specifically named the water as a pond when the original refers only to 'sitting on the bank'.

The unnamed one has, perhaps a little ironically, given a name to Alice's sister who is now 'Anna' and dressed the rabbit in a top hat and tails with a briefcase.

Now I can see from the language used that all of these alternate versions are meant for younger readers. The most complex of them, the Archie Oliver, still uses sentences that are shorter than the original and with a simpler structure. Clearly that's the purpose of the adaptation – to provide a book more accessible to younger readers. But 'The Nursery Alice' does the same thing without introducing any new elements, just by removing some of the existing ones. (It's also designed to be read out with lots of asides from the adult reader to the young child, but that's a different kind of adaptation.)

I can see the point of adapting. Really, I can. What I can't see the point of is adding all this extra detail. The original Alice is an acknowledged classic and, while there are certain elements of it that would be incomprehensible to a modern child, can be enjoyed still in its unamended form. The Archie Oliver one is tolerably well written with decent if unexceptional illustrations but what, actually, was the point? Why did it need to be rewritten? Should a version for younger/more modern readers be abridged? Perhaps. Should archaic references be removed or explained? Again, perhaps. Should the book be rewritten as from memory by someone who once saw the Disney version twenty years ago? Well, there's no reason why not, but also nothing, as far as I can see to be gained from the exercise, except perhaps the feeling by the adaptor that he has done something to earn his fee and perhaps a feeling that he has somehow stamped his own mark on it.

The Starlight version is more curious than I have lead you to believe. The opening paragraph is a model of sane abridgement compared to what follows. It introduces pirates and parrots (and parrots dressed as pirates). The tea party doesn't have a hatter and a hare and a dormouse, it has 'a strange group of characters' including an elephant (and, in the illustrations if not the text, a fox, a tortoise and a teddy bear). Alice is arrested for hitting the queen with a flamingo and sentenced to be thrown into a dungeon. And so on. Nothing at all to do with the book really. This isn't so much an adaptation as a random variation. And why? Certainly not for the fame as my researches have been unable to identify any author's name.

Anyway. My verdict on these versions is that they are strictly for collectors. That they are well done isn't in question but someone once said "there is nothing so useless as doing well something that should not be done at all" and that sums them up perfectly.
If you like the illustrations, by all means get the books but if you want a story to read to your kids, I'd go with the original or with Carroll's own Nursery Edition. They are classics for a reason.

I'm Late, I'm Late...

What do you do when you don't have time to complete your planned blog about the Turner Prize?

You dig out some old book reviews you wrote about Alice In Wonderland related books and post them instead.

Alice In Blunderland (John Kendrick Bangs)

Alice In Washington (Richard Pray Bonine)

What is it about Alice that, more than any other book, it draws people with all sorts of motives to write pastiches? There are enough books and articles in the style of Alice to fill a decent sized library. From explanations of quantum mechanics to treatises on saving the rain forest to books of mathematical puzzles it seems there is no end to it. I even won a T-shirt myself once with a letter of the month to a magazine in the style of Alice’s conversation with Humpty Dumpty. But I digress. Beyond all those things it draws political satirists like raths to a sundial. Whenever someone wants to point out the absurdities of any political landscape the first metaphor out of the bag is always Wonderland. I’d assumed this to be a modern phenomenon but I find I was mistaken.
Two recent additions to my collection have been Alice In Washington by Richard Pray Bonine and Alice In Blunderland: An Iridescent Dream by John Kendrick Bangs. The latter was published in 1907 so a new thing this most definitely isn’t.
Satire by its very nature has a short shelf life. Targets that are well known and in the public eye today could well be largely forgotten tomorrow. Today’s satire can all too easily become tomorrow’s incomprehensible gibberish.
So how does the 1907 book fare? Surprisingly well, is the answer. Bangs chose to satirise concepts – specifically the concept of state ownership as opposed to private enterprise. He also managed to do it in such a way that while not understanding the point would remove some of the pleasure from the book it would nonetheless remain quite amusing for the absurdities used as illustration - the train that completely encircles the city and doesn’t actually move (you get on at your stop and walk along the train until you reach the stop where you want to get off) for example or the attempt to run cars on a mixture of cologne and hot air which is very logically and reasonably explained.
It’s a brief but moderately entertaining read and by targeting ideas and concepts remains at least partially relevant today.
Alice in Washington is another thing altogether. Published in 1999 it’s already past its sell by date. It chooses to satirise the life of Bill Clinton. It’s with a little shamefaced nod of self-deprecation that I admit to giving up halfway through it. Put bluntly to an Englishman not familiar with all the ins and outs of the Clinton Governorship and Presidency it is the aforementioned incomprehensible gibberish. It probably is to most Americans too unless they can name all the major players in the Whitewater affair or list in alphabetical order the members of the Clinton administration. I found the book pretty much unreadable and am, now that I think about it, astonished that I managed to get as far as I did. The cover blurb describes it as “a gentle satire full of puns and poems and galloping alliterations”. Well, perhaps it is but a less accessible book I have yet to see.
Perhaps someone who is American can read the thing and enlighten me. Is it just my British perspective or am I being over generous in thinking I’d like it better if I came from Baltimore instead of Birmingham?

Alice’s Journey Beyond The Moon (R.J. Carter. Ill. Lucy Wright)

Sequels by other hands are often tricky beasts and never more so than when, as here, presented with the central conceit that they are a “lost manuscript” by the original author. This, like other pretenders, is of course no such thing. It is a new story. The problem with it is that the pretence that it is a lost Carroll manuscript extends to a series of long footnotes explaining how the various jokes and whimsies fit into the lives and events surrounding both Dodgson and Alice Liddell. These footnotes are done in the style of “The Annotated Alice” side by side with the text. For example the footnotes to one of the poems (giving the recipe for a rather unusual pie) explain that the ingredient “wet collodian” was a photographic chemical with which Dodgson would have been familiar and the nonsense word “queechy” refers to a novel by Elizabeth Wetherell that he gave to his sister Henrietta on her twelfth birthday. The depth of research into Dodgson’s life is impressive but as a literary device it all rapidly becomes rather tiresome and it’s a good idea to read the book through and ignore the footnotes altogether until you have finished.
What, then, of the story itself? At ninety pages it’s quite a thin tale but pastiches the style of Carroll quite well. Some of the puns and jokes are good and there are quite a lot of amusing touches. The artwork while not in the Tenniel style complements the story nicely and I suspect that there are many references and subtleties that a single reading has failed to reveal to me. The main problem is that at times it tries rather too hard to be clever. References to Descartes and an exposition of Zeno’s paradox are deftly handled but seem a little out of place. The insistence on explaining some of them in those annoying Gardneresque footnotes doesn’t help. As soon as you need to explain a joke it ceases to be funny.
The story has Alice journeying to the moon through the eyepiece of a telescope and while there having the kind of adventures that she had in Wonderland and through the looking glass. The style doesn’t quite hit the mark but comes much closer than Jeff Noon’s Automated Alice (though not as close as Gilbert Adair’s Alice Through The Needle’s Eye ). This is “explained” by suggesting that the work was written some years after the original stories, again an explanation that is necessary only because the author insists on maintaining the fiction that this is a lost story.
What of the poems and songs? Once again they are in the correct style and character and with a nice whimsy but they lack the surety of Dodgson’s metre and caused me to stumble in trying to get the rhythms right.

Final verdict? A slight but diverting dreamlike tale which would have been all the better if more attention had been given to crafting a longer story and less to the learned and mock-erudite footnotes.

Bad Alice (Jean Ure)

It’s impossible to review this book adequately without giving away the major plot points so if you are likely to read it -- and in spite of it being a very disturbing read I recommend that you do -- and don’t want to know in advance what it’s about then skip to the end of the review now.

Still here? Then let’s get on with it.

Bad Alice concerns the friendship between two children one summer. Duffy is a teenage boy with mild Tourette’s syndrome and Alice is the girl next door. Alice is a child that is universally agreed to be a bad sort – universally that is except for Duffy who strikes up an immediate friendship with her.
As the plot unfolds the disturbing nature of Alice’s family set up is revealed and the abusive relationship with her father is readily apparent to adult eyes reading the book if not to the adult characters. Duffy’s gradual realisation that his friend’s obsession with Alice in Wonderland masks very deep and real problems is poignant and painful to us because we have seen coming what we know he must eventually realise. Alice’s problems become most apparent through the version of Alice in Wonderland which she is secretly writing and allowing him to read. These sections are at times a little too knowing and articulate for a thirteen year old to have written but that is the only slight flaw in an otherwise brilliant but deeply disturbing book. This should be on recommended reading lists for all teenagers as the handling of one of the worst problems that exists in society is sensitive and intelligent and raising the awareness within teenagers that such problems don’t have to be simply endured must be a good thing.
Come to that raising the awareness of the problem among adults is also not a bad idea. Maybe, if enough people had their awareness raised then we could eradicate this kind of thing altogether and books like this would become unnecessary.

Final verdict. A sensitive, disturbing and above all necessary read.