BOOK
#32

Alice in Wonderland &
Through the Looking Glass
by Lewis Carroll





Review by Edward Tanguay
February 13, 1996

Although I'm sure I had never actually read Alice in Wonderland before, I felt as though I knew the whole story as I was reading it this time. Perhaps I had seen the Disney film when I was young. Or perhaps this story trickles down through literature so much drop by drop that whether you have actually read it or not, no part of the story will sound foreign. I noticed some classic lines that I had seen quoted in various books. One was when Alice asks the Cheshire cat which way to go:

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

The Cheshire Cat kills me. His best line is:

"Did you say 'pig', or 'fig'?"

He seemed to be the fullest character, slightly interested in things ("By the way, what happened to the baby?") yet just smiling and roaming around vanishing and disappearing--quite the personality of a cat really.

The tea party was a bit too bizarre for me although some of the play on words were interesting. The whole party reminded me somewhat of watching David Lynch's movie "Eraser Head" where you just keep asking yourself "when is this going to move on?"

The Queen was of course a classic with her one-phrase solution to anything that poses as a problem, but the Duchess was the one that made me laugh "digging her sharp little chin into Alice's shoulder" (!) and quoting her morals. She's typifies the ultimate "undesirable conversation partner" at a dinner party.

The Mock Turtle and Gryphon were too way-out for me and the trial didn't interest me like some of the other parts. The freshness of this story comes from the innocence and playfulness of Alice and from her bizarre little world that somehow holds itself together as a consistent whole despite the varied characters and experiences. This story has a spirit to it that challenges nonlinear thinking and sparks creative thoughts.


*** Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll
*** Notes by Edward Tanguay
*** February 18, 1996

If you read these stories too quickly you'll lose the dreamlike transitions (shop into rowboat and rowboat into shop), the metamorphoses (queen into mutton and mutton into soup) and the numerous disappearing acts. The Looking Glass was very dreamlike in its lack of real-world causality, lack of concern thereof, and dreamlike experiences such as the upwardly moving object in the shop that eventually went through the ceiling. (Perhaps a good way to write children's literature is to base stories on your own dreams.)

The forward to my book mentioned the sense of timelessness in this story being emphasized in the railroad car scene when the attendent compares time to money. Only then is time worth anything. The rest of the story seems to enjoy the safe haven that children enjoy away from real time pressure. Geography and speed and rate of speed and distance and most measurements of natural science have also been altered in this strange universe. I enjoyed the enduring analogy of the chess board and of Alice being a pawn that had to become a queen. It was the one tidbit that my left brain was able to pick out and enjoy.

I found it funny in an odd way (or odd in a funny way) that various characters verbally attack Alice so often. The funniest was the unicorn:

"It didn't hurt him," the Unicorn said carelessly, and he was going on, when his eye happened to fall upon Alice: he turned round instantly, and stood for some time looking at her with an air of the deepest disgust. "What--is--this?" he said at last.

Yet Alice asserts herself more and more throughout the Looking Glass world until she is eventually "grows up" and becomes queened. I, too, like her "spunk, inquisitive nature, and energy" as Lael put it quite well. She so innocently accepts this bizarre world she is in that you have to adore her. (And it is when your own everyday world resembles this crazy world that you admire her!) I also see Alice as a precious conversationalist, something like a Jane Austen character as a child-- something that, when it is found in literature, you have to admire and appreciate.

Edward Tanguay


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