This blog post contains some spoilers for After Alice by Gregory Maguire. As the book was only very recently released, this warning has been put her as a courtesy.
After Alice by Gregory Maguire, if you have not yet read it, is a reintroduction to a world that doesn’t make sense. It is the dark side of Wonderland. I will admit, it’s tame in comparison to some versions. (I refer here to Splintered by A. G. Howard as well as a few other versions I can just barely think of off the top of my head.) But the danger in After Alice is much more subtle, more underlying.
And I want to know what happened to Siam!
I can’t really describe when I began to like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but I can tell you that it was not as a child. I think I fell into it from the perspective of a tea drinker and book lover who found themselves leaning toward a motiff in china and began to replicate it in other places. However, there are other themes to the original that had me going back again and again.
Lewis Carroll’s idea of Wonderland is two-fold. It is a story of a child exploring a strange world. It is also mathematical. There is a certain science in the way the absurdity unfolds. The remark that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are commentaries on the absurdities of calculus are ones that I can commiserate with as I myself understand calculus very little. (Give me algebra any day over that dratted calculus!)
It is also frightening if looked at through the right lens. While Stephen Fry’s version of the Cheshire Cat may have us thinking that having a Cheshire Cat for a friend would be not only handy for wounds that need treating by creatures with evaporating powers but might actually be kind of fun, he deceives us away from our original thought of a cat that can smile that big…
The phrase, “My, what big teeth you have,” comes to mind.
Which is precisely why I remember putting down After Alice at one point thinking, “I think Ada’s been eaten by the Cat and doesn’t know it yet!” I was pretty panicked at that point. It was around Ada’s third or fourth attempt to get to the garden party with little success.
But what I really liked about After Alice was the fact that we continued to see what was happening to the people who were in our world – and a glimpse into the life of Charles Darwin, if ever so briefly. The abolition rhetoric throughout, as well as Lydia’s reaction to Siam’s presence, and the insight we get to Siam’s mind shows us clearly the kind of world we still somewhat live in. It puts our world up to a lens and shows us what is happening – be it along side a whole world of crazy.
While there is a large part of me that would have liked Siam to be rescued alongside Ada, I also know from a historical perspective why Siam might wish to stay. While Wonderland held its dangers, it was easy enough for Siam to survive in comparison with the things that he knew he would face in our world. He was not judged for his skin color in Wonderland, unless of course he was talking to Ada – who though she accepted him probably brought some preexisting prejudice into her interactions with him.
Gregory Maguire’s use of a main character who had flaws that were sought to be corrected by a blinded society standard was also very clever. It gave a new perspective to Alice’s Wonderland that needed to be viewed both from a different time period and from a different understanding of the world – through the shadowy lens of time and an understanding of class systems and beautification rituals that did not fully exist at the time of Lewis Carroll’s writing.
This also makes me wonder out of interest if Gregory Maguire has ever seen the Manhattan Project’s Alice in Wonderland. The imaginary beasts just did a wonderful version of it that I quite enjoyed as an Alice enthusiast at the Boston Center for the Arts. It also tackles Alice from a darker perspective, though closer to one of insanity and gaslighting. But more on that later…
All in all, I quite enjoyed Gregory Maguire’s trip down the rabbit hole. Quite as much as I enjoyed his foray into Russian folktales in Egg and Spoon, which still holds the top of my list for Gregory Maguire books.