Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture

Will Brooker is the handsomest former nerd in central London, and he takes his own edge off by cligning to the little bit inside him that still feels rejected, neglected, and put on the shelf by the cooler kids. His analysis of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass feels like something actually felt, not just abstracted, and it's clear that he keeps taking down from the hook all these various interpretations of Lewis Carroll's character, unable to settle on one, to see which one fits him the best. He is relentlessly modish and thoroughly up-to-date, and yet an old-fashioned drive for completion gives his character an uncharacteristic burnish, an OCD shadow. His book is terrifically written, on a sentence by sentence basis, but after awhile it does get wearisome, usually because like a handful of other practitioners of deconstructionist theory, Brooker is unable to give another full credit without sniping away at him or her. Every text that he picks up to examine will be revealed to have some huge flaw which Brooker doesn't share in. He's divided his study into nine general areas, from representations of Lewis Carroll in recent biography, to the fandom with which his own recent work has been concerned. At least one of these topics, the section in which he critiques many illustrators of Lewis Carroll, should have been jettisoned for, despite what he thinks, Brooker lacks the ability to write well about the visual arts, odd for one who has written extensively on many comic artists, but alas, he's pretty bankrupt there. Another chapter devotes itself to contemporary sequels to ALICE, including Jeff Noon and Gilbert Adair, and here again a weakness in Brooker's comprehensive approach becomes obvious at once: although he has just about nothing to say about Adair's ALICE THROUGH THE NEEDLE'S EYE, he feels obliged to "cover" it with the same word count as he does everything else. Against these minor flaws Brooker's book is an arsenal of critical insight and, as well, sheer writing chops. His opening salvo, tearing apart a series of biographers for their outright misstatements and lack of perspective, could hardly be better planned nor achieved. I would never have thought of the simple method he winds up using, which is, he isolates five areas of mystery in Carrollian biography, and one by one he examines what X, Y, or Z says about each. For example, what of the cut diary pages? What about the heartfelt diary entries which entreat his God to make him a more decent man? And what about those nude photographs of little boys and girls? OK, maybe he tries to do too much, and depends on his own adorableness for pages at a time, but this is a thoroughly exciting book and I hope Brooker sees fit to keep it up to date in the years to come, maybe staging an Alice Biennale or something like.

Lewis Carroll wrote "Alice In Wonderland" and is most noted for this achievement, but he did so much more, fostering the setting for later computer games, theme parks, and performances inspired by his works. Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll In Popular Culture isn't just another coverage of Carroll's life; it's a survey of how the characters he created live on in modern times, adapted since his death in 1898. The analysis juxtaposes perfectly with his life and times and creates for more depth in the analysis of Alice's ongoing effects on modern culture, than the modern biography could achieve.

Possibly the 60s were the time when Alice began to enter the popular culture.In 1963 for example there was a girl singer who named herself Alice Wonderland and made a single.A month or two earlier Neil Sedaka had landed Alice on to the Top 40. A matter of months later,as the Beatles began to conquer America,came John Lennon's 2nd book,like the first,influenced by Lewis Carroll's nonsense writings. (Carroll would be further immortalised by the Beatles when he was one of the figures on the Sgt Pepper sleeve). Then came the first rumblings of the new American music influenced by both the Beatles and folk music in general.The Great Society were one of many trying for a bite of the cherry and lead singer Grace Slick wrote a song called "White Rabbit",more or less a comment about parents who gave their kids Alice books then wondered why they ended up taking drugs. (Obviously tongue in cheek as Slick took more than her share during the Jefferson Airplane years:this was the band who she joined after the Great Society taking with her the 2 songs they'd recorded ,one of which was "White Rabbit". The rest is history. Alice has always been at least of enough fascination to the music world as to have inspired no end of songs or band names from "Alice In Sunderland" to the Mock Turtles,Carolyn Wonderland or even the very title of the 2nd book ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS,who were a duo from the village of Ditchling in Suffolk and who wrote some music for a local Alice production. The album was a limited edition and is now worth over £1000 as its regarded as Folk Rock or whatever but even the reissue is worth quite a bit Someday the definitive book may be written about the Alice influence on popular music but meanwhile there's this one

"Curiouser and curiouser." "Beware the Jabberwock, my son!" "When _I_ use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" Even if you don't know the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, chances are you have heard these quotations. The books are so well known that they have, according to one report, been quoted more than any other source except the Bible and Shakespeare. The timelessness of the appeal of _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ and _Through the Looking Glass_ can easily be appreciated in the book _Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture_ (Continuum) by Will Brooker. It is an examination of the manifestations of Alice in the past fifteen or so years, with some attention paid for historic context to the rest of the twentieth century. That there is still lively participation by Alice in many surprising aspects of our modern world is a cheerful reminder of how good the original books are, and Brooker's own witty book gives hope that Alice will always have a role to play in the culture of any age.But Carroll (actually The Reverend Charles L. Dodgson) himself has in the past decade played a darker role than he ever did before. In an age when we worried about pedophiles, and also worried needlessly about people accused in atrocious error of being pedophiles, Carroll's fascination for little girls has become suspect and smutty. Academic papers have been issued to reinforce such views, but all are largely circumstantial. Thus it seems wiser to think of Carroll with more magnanimity, and to remember that he was never in his time considered anything more threatening than a respectable Oxford don with an eagerness to entertain by mathematical and linguistic puzzles and stories. The popular press has followed the academic lead, however. The darker themes of Wonderland have been brought out in recent illustrations for the books, but even here, "... none of these illustrators taps to any noticeable degree into the reading of _Alice_ as steeped in sexual overtone..." Brooker shows how the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel have always influenced subsequent illustrators. Brooker has great fun taking part in the activities of the Lewis Carroll Society, and finds a pleasant peer pressure: when he wrote to other members he found himself gradually using an address that was much more formal and polite "...than I would ever have used towards, say, the _Star Wars_ fans of my previous research." _Alice's Adventures_ gives a look back to how other generations interpreted the tales. The stories don't have pedophilia in them, but these suppositions color our current view of the author. In the 1930s, there were abundant psychoanalytic interpretations, and in the 1960s there were psychedelic interpretations. Brooker also spends a chapter on an animated computer shooter game, "Dark Wonderland," with Alice as a sexually provocative heroine. The books themselves, however, r