It’s quite the thing these days to take a classic novel as inspiration, or even an ancient one in some cases, and take it to new and exciting places that honour the original work and author but explore new territory.
In many cases, it’s done brilliantly and originally well, as is definitely the case with Alice by Christina Henry, which the cover art alone will tell you draws creative zest and power from Lewis Carroll’s classic 19th century novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and executes the honouring the old while exploring the new in some thrillingly intense ways.
One thing is clear from the outset – all of the implied horror lurking just below the idiosyncratically weird text of Carroll’s text finds free and often violently dark expression in a novel which understands how dark the human, and non-human for that matter, heart can be and how anyone who deviates from accepted norms, those pretty rituals and behavioural civilisational trinkets we adorn ourselves within to hide the evolutionarily feral beast within, is shunned and hidden away.
There’s a lot crammed into the 300-plus pages of Alice which seethes with lost dreams, broken connections and the beating hearts of two people whom society has rejected but who find an unexpected home with each other, both in the cells of the hospital where they are imprisoned for daring not to be sane – or “sane” as defined by a world that’s clearly tucked away its dark and twisted places where no one can see them and then judged those souls struggling with mental health issues as if they are criminals – and without once fortune favours them with sweet release.
She [Alice] turned back to him slowly, feeling like she wasn’t entirely herself in her own body, feeling like something inside her had woken up and she didn’t really want that something there.
Released from their dank, dark cells in a hospital barely for the name, Alice and her next door cellmate Hatcher, who is clinically mad and an axe murderer to boot but who loves her with a purity of devotion Alice has never known, the onetime partaker of mad hatter tea parties and follower of white rabbits finds herself on the run in the social deprived and criminally ruled environs of the Old City.
Ignored and left to rot by the burghers of the squeaky, shiny New City, the Old City harbours all kinds of dangers and peril, including warlords who control sections of the city with magic, thuggery and beastial, cruel violence, the sort that Alice (reluctantly) and Hatcher (eagerly) have to partake in to do what they need to do which is defeat the Jabberwocky which was housed in the same hospital and is now terrifyingly free.
Almost as terrifying for a woman traumatised by long-ago events which left a shell of her former self and estranged from a family who has suffered no wrong bar a social slight thanks to Alice’s degraded state, is the fact that somewhere in the Old City lurks the Rabbit, a man or creature who did unspeakably terrible things to her and who even know somehow invades her thoughts and tortured dreams.
(courtesy official author site / (c) Christopher Lamitie)
Alice is not your grandmother’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and yet in many ways it is, the natural heir to a novel that explored the darkness of the human heart in many metaphorically clever ways that more than hinted at the fact that we can construct artifice of societal good behaviour and yet be sheltering some truly horrifying things within.
In Henry’s superbly realised work, the dark impulses within come roaring out with Alice taking readers deep into a world where very young women are traded as capitalistic sexual commodities, where people are killed en masse for territorial gain in tight, dark streets and where human life barely rates a mention against the accumulation of power and money.
It’s against some very incisive social commentary that is woven easily and penetratingly into a hugely engaging story, full of epic flight and fights and some truly intimate moments that break the heart and build it up again, that Alice and Hatcher battle on an epic quest of their own, meeting the Walrus, confronting the Cheshire and coming grips with the fact that nightmares lurk within tortured memories of cake and tea.
Henry does an impressive job of name-checking many of the elements of Carroll’s classic without feeling like it’s slavishly sticking them to tick some doffing of the cap boxes, and it means that while Alice is clearly a firm heir apparent to its long-ago but still much-loved work, it is very much it’s own sparkling dark and immersively compelling story.
When she’d [Alice] seen Pipkin being whipped, her fear had disappeared, and it had never properly returned. She was not stronger than the Walrus. He could overpower her easily. She didn’t even know what to do with the magic she possessed. But she had not been afraid.
What emerges quite strongly in Alice is that the people who were deemed to be monsters, condemned as deviations from the accepted norms are in fact far better human beings than almost anyone they encounter and that they, Alice in particular who harbours wondrous secrets and a brilliantly promising destiny that she struggles to own at first, might be the ones to save the world from a powerful darkness that might otherwise consume it.
It challenges this idea that many people that if you simply slap a label on something and ignore the goodness or darkness within, that you can reshape the narrative and that the uncontrollable and the unstoppable can be shoved into neat and tidy boxes and we can all go about our business untroubled.
But life and darkness and light and magic simply don’t work like that and Henry glories in challenging these simplistic notions, encouraging readers to rethink how we compartmentalise people and how the villains may be heroes and the heroes may be, well, you know.
Henry is too good a writer to simply make that point nakedly and without some fearfully good narrative prose wrapped around it, and so Alice, while it is ripe with social commentary and some damning points, is a creepy, heartfelt tale of terror and hope that defies convention, takes on societal ill and the darkness within and without and delivers up justice served and a hugely thrilling story that leave readers buzzing while their hearts are sated with the truth of what is and what can be when all the labels and lies are stripped away.