Book review: After Alice by Gregory Maguire

In our information-hungry, story-craving modern age, there is an almost unquenchable thirst for sequels, prequels and accompanying tales.

Conditioned by revivals and reimaginings, reboots and revisits, the modern pop culture consumer views story add-ons as an almost inalienable right, a belief bolstered by a postmodern sensibility and digital access to pretty much all the information that is and ever was, which engenders a worldview that sees nothing wrong with leaping back and forth between old and new and adding to them if need be.

If you’re an imaginative storyteller, then the storytelling fields are ripe for some innovative, clever harvests, something that Gregory Maguire, the New York Times bestselling author of Wicked, a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, knows only too well.

His 2015 novel, After Alice, which is itself a clever play on words since it indicates not a follow-on story but one where other contemporaries of Alice are in a seemingly wild goose after her, takes a minorly-referenced character from Lewis Carroll’s trippy classic Alice in Wonderland and crafts a companion story that is every bit as wild and instructional as its much-loved predecessor.

Maguire succeeds in taking Carroll’s tale, replete with many of the characters we know and love such as the Mad Hatter, the Walrus and the Queen of Hearts, and making it very much his own while still honouring the spirit and style of the original.

“The Carpenter slapped his palm against the Walrus’s upturned flipper, and they danced a bit of a quadrille, as well as they could without six partners.

‘Well, that settles that, then!” said the Carpenter. ‘Am I right or am I right?’

‘Is that another riddle?’ asked Ada. ‘What do I get if I answer it correctly?’

‘A further chance to fail,’ said the Carpenter. (P. 39)

That may sound like an easy undertaking in one sense since the template is already well-established and well-know, essentially offering a writer such as Maguire a seemingly ridiculously simple opportunity to craft his own story without the burden of exposition.

Perception is one thing and execution quite another as many failed attempts to revive or add to classics will attest.

You may have a ready made world and an assembled, known cast of characters but it’s not simply enough to rearrange them, fiddle a little with the plot and do it all over again.

For one thing, who would actually read that kind of retread? But more importantly, it would feel like a faint echo, a dull copy of a vibrant original and many people would tire of it before they reached the predictable finish line.

Maguire, whose ear for Carroll’s cadence is a witty joy at every turn, clearly understands this and while his addition to the Wonderland canon does pay homage to much of its existing world and its loopy though intelligently-realised inhabitants, After Alice never feels like a tired reiteration of an already-told tale.

Switching near-effortlessly between adventures on Wonderland and 186_ – the book is deliciously obtuse when it comes to actual dates; suffice to say we are well into the Victorian age with the Queen of England herself actually making an appearance at one point – After Alice brings us the adventures of Ada, a neighbour of Alice’s family, whose family is caught in a disruption almost as profound as that visited upon Alice’s family following the death of her mother.

Ada is Alice’s only real friend and vice versa, and she leads a strict life under the overly-authoritarian strictures of Miss Armstrong, a woman of strong ideals and even stronger mind who insists on chaperoning her young charge everywhere, partly out of ordained social convention which views unaccompanied activities by young women of any age as some scandalous undertaking and partly because Ada has a curved spine which necessitates the constant wearing of a metal contraption and a tightly-circumscribed geographical reach.

Hers is a very constrained world and so one day when she sense the opportunity to escape Miss Armstrong and go in search of Alice and the wider world unaccompanied, she takes uit and runs, later tumbling into the same fantastical world that Alice is currently embroiled in.

While Ada experiences hitherto unexperienced freedom, her sister Lydia and Miss Armstrong set off to find them, neither particularly enamoured of the other even though they are stifled, in their own ways, by a suffocatingly dictated set of social conventions which clearly favour men over women.

Alternating between the above ground and Wonderland offers a unique chance to compare and contrast the dour strictures of English society with what first appears as the manic freedoms of Wonderland.

Lydia was glad Mrs. Brummidge was collecting something from the larder, so missing this exchange; otherwise she’d have charged into this conversation. Lydia went on.

‘Alice lives in a queer no-man’s land, Miss Armstrong, as far as we can tell. She isn’t capable of malice and she hasn’t discovered deviousness. No doubt you’re wise to become exercised over the disappearance of Ada. But for this household to do the same over Alice’s adventures would be ill-advised. Alice will return when she does. Likely, Ada will be with her. I think you are rather overwrought today.'” (P. 181)

But like everything in life, even worlds inhabited by disappearing oceans, contrary doors and strange garden and tea parties, all is not what it seems.

Wonderland, as is obvious in Alice in Wonderland, is almost as hidebound as its above ground counterpart.

Certainly, there are some differences, particularly the devil-may-care loopiness of its characters who feel free to question and defy a reality which pays no heed to the banal certainties of our world, but by and large, there is a world where convention rules too and After Alice does a superb job of showing how people everywhere, even those made of tin and cardboard, tend to all favour setting social behaviour in stone.

Wonderland then, given a refreshed vivacity and enhanced social commentary by Maguire who handles issues like race, slavery, women’s rights and social mores in After Alice with sage but giddy aplomb, is less the opposite of the world Ada, Alice and a slave boy named Siam have temporarily escaped and more a crazy reflection of it.

It may seem wacky and original and free as a strangely-coloured bird but it is simply a reiteration in more manically nonsensical clothes, of the world above, a confirmation that humanity and its accompanying creatures are doomed to follow the same patterns over and over.

But also, rather hopefully, After Alice speaks of the mental and emotional liberty that comes from slipping loose your normal bonds, and while you may return from whence you came with reality little changed, you will have been transformed, as is Ada, and that can make all the difference.