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| Inherited copies of Alice's Adventures and Through the Looking Glass. |
Great to live in alternate realities, offers MH. Despite a well-publicized
aversion to anthropomorphic literary characters and our disinclination to
tumble down rabbit holes into those alternate realities, we embrace the wonderfully nonsensical sensibility of Alice and her Wonderland. We frolic in this sanctuary of cultural literacy with its intricate
narrative form, its exceptional characters, its evocative illustrations. We’re dealing
cards, we’re playing chess; we marvel at hookah-smoke and mirror-images. Let's have a Mad Tea-Party! We pour a spot of sun tea—served with
yummy tarts—and carry those much-loved books to a quiet, sun-dappled-shady corner of the garden. We feel the brushing breeze in our hair and the
green-green grass between our toes. We read
the words, peruse the pictures, and continue a meandering conversation that began all on a summer day....
Alice I
Have Been by Melanie Benjamin.
New
York: Random House, 2010. 368 pages.
Historical
Fiction
But
oh my dear, laments Alice Liddell Hargreaves, I am tired of being Alice in
Wonderland. Does it sound ungrateful?
And oh my dear, we are unsettled by Alice I Have Been, imaginative
historical fiction and unconventional love story, a first-time gift from
Melanie Benjamin. Unsettled, but not at
all ungrateful.... We
appreciate the well-researched narrative, the nuanced characters created from biographical sketches of
Charles Dodgson, Alice Liddell, and her family, collodion fact supplemented with vibrant fiction. But as we gaze upon that discomfiting photograph of six-year-old Alice as a beggar-girl, we wonder, where is the moral, what can it mean? As the Duchess says to Alice, Everything’s
got a moral, if only you can find it.
On
the eve of her eighty-first birthday, Alice Liddell Hargreaves revisits her
life story and regretfully surmises that she will be remembered simply as the
real-life Alice in Wonderland, that her legacy has been defined by a fateful
moment on a summer’s day seventy years gone by—when she encouraged an eccentric,
socially awkward Oxford professor to commit his fantastically entertaining
stories to paper. Sheltered
within the constricted embrace of a proper and privileged Victorian childhood, restless
spirit Alice Liddell catches the attention of family acquaintance Charles Dodgson
and serves as the muse for his photography and writing... his pictures and
conversation, dare we say? Before we dare say it, the relationship is
misapprehended—understandably, perhaps—by Alice's family: Dodgson is banished
from Alice’s life and Alice is, in time, banished from her Wonderland of
youthful innocence, imaginative insouciance, and illusions of immortality.
Childhood yields to love and loss, to marriage and motherhood, to peacetime romance and wartime heartbreak. Alice remains unsettled and haunted by her connection to Dodgson. We’re unsettled, too... and haunted by this fictional portrayal of the real-life
Alice, a character as compelling as Lewis Carroll's creation.
The
Alice behind Wonderland by Simon Winchester.
Oxford
University Press, 2011. 110 pages.
Non
Fiction and Biography
Tomorrow,
we will visit the Library of the Chathams and check out a nonfiction exploration
of the inspiration behind Alice in Wonderland, learning how Dodgson’s
passion for photography influenced both his vision of Wonderland and his
vision of Alice. Today, however, we have an unsettling and haunting vision of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, circa 1985:
Don't Come around Here No More
The
Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones.
Harper,
2012. 262 pages.
Fiction
Favorites/Mystery and Suspense
Don't come around here no more, indeed. English country house Stern teeters on the brink of fiscal and physical ruin. Head of household Edward Swift-- steadfast, one-armed, maligned-- quits the
moldering mansion for Manchester, leaving comely wife Charlotte and three
stepchildren, Emerald, Clovis, and Smudge, to their own idiosyncratic
devices and peculiar designs. Most of
the domestic staff has inconveniently absconded, yet preparations for Emerald’s
twentieth birthday celebration are under way. Loyal servants Florence and
Myrtle toil long and hard with fantastic
and imaginative results, producing various gratins and slabs of
pork, forced or minced, with mace, capers, thyme and the pièce
de résistance, a yummy chocolate cake with green-sugar roses:
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| Alternate Reality Book Cover 1 |
A select
group of invited friends arrive by train to join the celebration. And then... enter the
uninvited guests, victims of a gruesome accident on... a branch line. A branch line? Yes, a branch line: the displaced passengers are seeking shelter
at dilapidated Sterne until the maddeningly aloof railway company finds time to retrieve
them. One of the refugees, Traversham-Beechers, insinuates himself
upon the house party... curiouser and curiouser, we muse. Despite the kerfuffle, everyone
resolves to proceed with festivities for Emerald, even as the third-class
passengers, aka ghastly people, congregate-- and impossibly multiply-- in cramped
library exile. Emerald’s
birthday dinner plays like the Hatter’s Mad Tea-Party: place-switching, pithy observation,
nonsensical conversation, and Hinds and Hounds, a vicious party game instigated
by the progressively creepy Traversham-Beechers.
 |
| Alternate Reality Book Cover 2 |
As the
evening unfolds, various attachments are formed and broken, and love is in the air—as well
as an astonishing array of haunting and variably unsettling smells of sharp new things... hyacinths, lily of the valley and narcissi... wax
furniture polish and blue wood smoke... thunder... the wet-dog smell of damp
wool and old carpet... the sweet smell of dung... horse... a powerful smell of
mock turtle soup... kitten and fish... decay... an unclean and suppurating
wound... wood-smoke from the enormous fire in the great hall... lemon... the
smell of springtime in the dark and, believe it or not, bacon. Disregarding the aromas, confidences are shared,
long held secrets and true identities are discovered, and the house guests exhaust a great deal of time and effort rising to the occasion.
Curiouser
and curiouser? Charlotte was more
frightened now than curious... The very strange events of the nighttime produce
a frisson, like a cold wind over a wheat field. We will
remember The Uninvited Guests as a train wreck, but a train wreck in the best
possible sense. It’s a weird comedy of
manners that transmutes into an even weirder supernatural story, full of capricious
characters and narrative surprises... laden with fortifying animal
protein.
The House
at Riverton by Kate Morton.
Atria
Books, 2008. 473 pages.
Fiction
Favorites
In Through
the Looking Glass, the White Queen instructs Alice, It’s a poor sort of memory
that only works backwards. This gives us
pause! We
try to recollect what we will be reading two months hence but soon resume current literary pursuits: a handsome examination of time, memory, and between-the-wars domestic and social life in England by Kate Morton. Our story features a privileged-yet-preoccupied
family, a grand country house, a mysterious death, a way of life ravaged by
war and vanished forever. Revealed in flashback by a woman who
witnessed much and maintained a poor sort of memory for decades, The House at
Riverton harbors vivid characters, page-turning secrets, gothic overtones, and an unforgettable ending.
In 1999, an
aspiring film director takes ninety-eight-year-old nursing home resident Grace
Bradley back to Riverton House, reawakening long-suppressed memories of a long-ago
summer. As Grace reminisces, a strange
thing began to happen... Memories, long consigned to the dark reaches of my
mind, began to sneak through cracks.
Images were tossed up, high and dry, picture-perfect, as if a lifetime
hadn’t passed between. And, after the
first tentative drops, the deluge. Whole
conversations, word for word, nuance for nuance; scenes played out as if on
film....
 |
| Alice and the White Queen |
Grace finds employment at Riverton House in the days before the Great War
and becomes intimately involved with the Hartford family, especially with daughters Hannah
and Emmeline. In the summer of 1924, at
a seemingly splendid Riverton house party, a young poet shoots himself in a moment of incomprehensible violence. The only witnesses to the lakeshore death are Hannah and Emmeline: they know the truth and so, perhaps,
does Grace. Skeletons rattle in the closets at Riverton, and elegant specters stalk the hallways and traverse the grounds. With a nod to the White Queen, we remember The House at Riverton... before and after we read it.
Rebecca
by Daphne Du Maurier.
Harper,
2006 (1938). 410 pages.
Oldies
But Goodies
Speaking
of skeletons rattling in the closets and elegant specters stalking the hallways
and traversing the grounds, last night we dreamt we went to Manderley
again. We revisit this favorite Cornwell
country house once every decade or so, only to find that the second Mrs. de
Winter continues to have a difficult time living in the omnipresent shadow of the
previous Mrs. de Winter. Things become curiouser and curiouser on the printed
page... our guileless narrator looks and sounds just like Joan Fontaine; temperamental
Max de Winter bears a striking resemblance to Sir Lawrence Olivier; sinister
Mrs. Danvers is a dead-ringer for Dame Judith Anderson! Curious how these things work out, we think, as
the Alfred Hitchcock 1940 film adaptation flickers and flames across the
television screen:
The
Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton.
Atria
Books, 2008. 552 pages.
Fiction
Favorites
I
can’t go back to yesterday, says Alice, because I was a different person
then.... Kate Morton takes us back to
yesterday and forth to today, carrying us from past to present, from present
to past and back again: from the impoverished backstreets of pre-Great War London
to the sunlit shores of colonial Australia and to the windswept, haunting, and timelessly
romantic Cornish coast. This is fiction and fairy tale, physical
and visceral journeying, a tribute to the potency of stories and the power of storytellers.
In
1913, a little lost English girl is abandoned on a ship. She arrives in Australia alone, carrying a
small suitcase that holds a few items of clothing and a single, singular artifact:
an exquisitely illustrated book of fairy tales. Taken
in and raised by a benevolent port master and his wife, the little lost English
girl is told the truth of her murky provenance on her twenty-first birthday. Adult foundling Nell, disoriented and adrift, embarks on a journey to England to discover
her past. Her search delivers her to a fantastic
house, a faltering family... and a dead end on the windswept, haunting, and timelessly
romantic Cornish coast.
Pictures or conversations: Nell’s granddaughter Cassandra, also disoriented
and adrift, remembers the day that she found
the book of fairy tales in her grandmother’s house ... She’d opened the front
cover and fallen inside the wonderful, frightening, magical illustrations. She’d wondered what it must have felt like to
escape the rigid boundaries of words and speak instead with such a fluid
language. After
Nell’s death, Cassandra decides to pick up the metaphorical garden tools and
dig into her grandmother's murky provenance. At
windswept, haunting, and timelessly romantic Cliff Cottage along the Cornish coast,
Cassandra discovers the forgotten garden of the heirloom book and disentangles brambly secrets from the fairy tale past.
 |
| Don't forget the garden! |
Alice
opened the door and saw that it led into a small passage, not much larger than
a rat-hole; she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest
garden you ever saw... The Forgotten Garden is lovely indeed. A bit manicured, perhaps, with requisite Generational Mysteries and Enchanted Landscapes, Tortured
Artists and Forbidden Love, and Forlorn Children and Garden Fairies, but the narrative is meticulously crafted, vividly imagined... and very nice to read on a
golden afternoon.
Hookah smoke! A butterfly perches on a nearby rosy-orange Lantana, and we remember Alice's curiouser and curiouser encounter with a large blue hookah-smoking Caterpillar, sitting on a mushroom, taking not the smallest notice of her or of anything else... Perhaps
you haven't found it so yet, said Alice, but when you have to turn into
a chrysalis... and then after that into a butterfly, I should think
you'll feel it a little queer, won't you? Not a bit, said the Caterpillar....
The
Distant Hours by Kate Morton.
Atria
Books, 2010. 562 pages.
Fiction
Favorites
So,
said Percy, returning to perch on the edge of the gramophone table, how was
your day? Curiouser and curiouser, as
Alice might have said.... Piqued by the arrival-by-post of a long-lost letter, bookish
Edie Burchill travels to Middlehurst Castle, the once-grand but now
disintegrating domicile of three Blythe spinsters: eldest twins Seraphina and Persephone--
aka Saffy and the above-referenced Percy-- and the youngest, Juniper, who
presents an emotionally disintegrated façade since her dashing fiancé
inexplicably jilted her in long-long ago 1941.
Edie seeks information about her mother, who was sheltered at
Middlehurst as a thirteen-year-old during World War II, but as she pieces
together mum’s billeted biographical information, she also begins to collect fragments from the
distant hours of a troubled past at Middlehurst. Oh, if those crumbling walls could offer up
pictures or conversations....
 |
| Not the Blythe twins: Tweedledum and Tweedledee. |
Before we can shake two twigs together and say
Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Edie tumbles through the looking glass and into the muniment
room at Middlehurst. The muniment
room? Ah yes, interposes BJM, the creepy
palatial version of a filing cabinet: the muniment room was a tomb, just like
those in ancient times. A pharoah’s
dark, cool tomb where precious things went to be forgotten. By the time I reached the table at the very
end, I felt as if I’d walked a marathon through Alice’s Wonderland.... We savor
each passing page of this moody story, rich with fated love and rife with
filial devotion, preoccupied with things remembered and moments forgotten... in
the distant hours.
Begin at the beginning and go on till you
come to the end; then stop....
With little notice, golden afternoon has given way to blushing rosy-orange sunset. We collect our books, our memories, and
retreat from the forgotten garden of childhood reading. We’ll place Alice
and her Wonderland lovingly on the shelf, safe and silent for now, to be revisited and
remembered on another summer’s day.
Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:
Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:
Thus slowly, one
by one,
Its quaint events were hammered out—
And now the tale
is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew,
Beneath the
setting sun....
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