Gregory Maguire has gotten pretty good at giving a voice to minor characters of major fairy tales; witches and stepsisters get a little more to say in books like Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Mirror Mirror.
Now he’s taking another look at Alice in Wonderland, and instead of following Alice, we follow someone who’s following her. Click the jump for a review of Gregory Maguire’s After Alice.
When I heard Maguire was retelling Alice in Wonderland, I assumed he’d tell it from, say, the White Rabbit’s point of view. Or the Queen of Hearts, or the Caterpillar. So I was surprised when he chose a character that we never saw in the original story; we only heard her name.
Ada was mentioned by Alice one time, when Alice was trying to think of who she might have turned into, if she wasn’t herself anymore. That’s it. Other than the fact that Ada had curly hair, Lewis Carroll didn’t tell us anything about her. So Maguire was free to create a perfect character to balance out everything that makes up Alice.
Where Alice is adventurous and active, Ada is mostly stuck at home because of the contraption she wears: it’s never mentioned exactly what’s wrong with her, but she has a birth defect or deformity that has warped her back, so she wears a medical corset or “iron spine.”
I get the idea that the defect isn’t nearly as bad as her family thinks it is, and that the corset is probably hurting her more than helping her. Ada thinks so too, and watching her figure all that out, and what happens to the corset eventually, is surprisingly neat.
Where Alice is imaginative, Ada is considered dull, but she isn’t stupid. She doesn’t have much of an imagination, but that comes from being a little too pragmatic for her age. She’s considered strange and willful, only because she won’t do what she’s told, because she questions the logic of almost everything around her.
This makes her trip into Wonderland especially fun.
Having tried to find her friend by the riverbank, Ada falls into the same rabbit hole Alice found. After that the entire book is about being one step behind Alice. She meets the same people, and sees the same strange things, (plus a lot of new people we never met in the original book) but somehow Ada seems on more solid footing than Alice ever did, better able to find a kind of weird logic in the chaos around her.
As ridiculous as Wonderland is, Ada starts to enjoy herself, even if she can’t shake the idea that Alice is in trouble.
The other main character in the book is Lydia, Alice’s older sister, and if you don’t remember her that’s okay, she’s mentioned by Alice originally as someone who reads books without pictures, and is otherwise a distant figure.
Lydia is the Victorian part of the storyline. She’s used to Alice disappearing all the time, so she’s not worried about it, even when Ada turns up missing too. Even then she has a hard time caring too much: Alice and Lydia’s mother passed away recently, and their father is still mourning for her very hard.
Everything is strange and sad, and Lydia feels like she’s having to grow up too fast. So it’s a welcome distraction when her father’s infamous friend Charles Darwin comes to visit. And yes, that name does seem to jump out of nowhere when you first hear it, but Darwin and Alice really do exist at the same point in real-world history.
Maguire has planted his whole book squarely in Victorian England, when the original Wonderland books were written. Maguire has sprinkled in events, places, people, customs, and beliefs all through the book, so we get to see what Alice’s life outside of Wonderland would have looked like, without him beating us over the head with a history book.
We even get a peek at what America looked like at the time, since Darwin’s traveling companion has adopted a young, former slave. The very brief look at his life makes up the darker side of the story.
The book really has everything I was hoping for: familiar characters from the original story, new characters that fit in as if Carroll wrote them himself, a new main character I liked even more than Alice (who I’ve always liked a lot) and a really lovely ending. A new story about the White Rabbit wouldn’t have made me nearly as happy.
(But I’m glad we got to see him too.)