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From the Vault: Alice in the Undertoad

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From misrule.com.au/s9y

Originally published Saturday March 6 2010

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I went to see Alice in Wonderland last night.

As some of my readers will know, Alice is one of my favourite books. I have a smallish but nice collection of different editions of Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well as another small but interesting collection of Alice-abilia/-iana, whatever you call it. (China, characters in different media, including a set of Beanie Babies of the Disney cartoon versions of the characters, 1920s toys, etc etc. Also Carroll-iana—I’m sure I’m making these words up!—collections of his photographs, biographies and so on. I should photograph the collectins and post it for those interested.) I’m not unusual in that regard: Alice is held dear by many of my friends in the children’s book world, and I wouldn’t say I’m any more of a fan than many, and less than some. But I thought it was worth mentioning as I am about to discuss the film: Alice figures large in the history of my reading life, but I am by no means a purest when it comes to adaptations or interpretations. I’m always interested to see what artists see in the books, which is why my collection focuses on illustrated editions across the past nearly 100 years. I don’t think I’ve really seen a straight filmed version of the book that I love, but nor do any offend me mortally. (I just don’t watch the Disney cartoon one, makes life very simple!)

So there you are: my personal context for seeing the film.

I should also say that I am generally pretty open-minded about film adaptations of books. I guess I tend to view them as very different experiences, and I go to see a movie and hope it is a good movie in movie terms—I don’t expect to see the book replicated on screen. That said, I do think it’s possible to completely ruin a book, and that’s usually the case with movies “adaptations” when you see the film and think, why did they even bother to pretend that it was based on the book. Or adaptations which so egregiously misrepresent important elements of the book—such as the race of the main characters—that I get as outraged and upset as the next person. But if a film makes a fair stab at adhering to the emotional truths of the book and don’t play fast and loose with its politics, I am usually OK with it.

And having said all that, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is not, of course, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

I didn’t realise that when the first trailer teaser was “leaked” on the internet. I assumed it was going to be Burton’s vision of the book, but it’s not. Well, not exactly. Instead, as I was more or less relieved to discover, the film was to be set several years after Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, when she is 19, and apparently escaping an unwelcome marriage proposal. I have to say the sound of the engagement plot didn’t appeal much (and it turns out that it still doesn’t appeal, now I’ve seen the film, but more of that later), but I didn’t mind the idea of the movie being Alice’s return, especially given Hollywood’s penchant for adding years to a protagonist’s age for the sake of “audience appeal” (read: The Twilight Effect). What I mean is, if they were going to cast an adult actress, then for heaven’s sake don’t pretend she’s 10, or worse, update the book to match her age. So on that count, the “sequel” idea sort of appealed, and in any case, I was interested to see what Burton would do with this “Return to Wonderland” approach.

For me, what he did—and I know that comparisons are odious, and I actually generally really love Burton’s films, so forgive me—but for me, what he did was give us a bit of a mashup of Narnia (with the Red Queen stepping in for the White Witch via a slightly mean caricature of Elizabeth 1) and a NorthernLights/The Golden Compass Lyra-esque prophecy with a dash of BBC costume drama (I’d say Austen but it’s about 40 years too late…), all with a modernish feminist(ish) sensibility.

And I don’t mind any of that, really. It just kind of seems… beside the point. The frame is pretty silly. The lost father stuff works OK motivation-wise (as my friend Monica points out at Educating Alice, her blog which is, of course, named for Carroll’s heroine), but the engagement stuff is pretty silly. The potential fiance is so utterly repugnant, and why on Earth would his stuffy mother be so keen on the engagement if the family business has gone bung? We don’t know who Alice’s sister is until an utterly spurious scene in which Alice finds her brother-in-law kissing someone else in the hedges, which is, and remains, apropros of absolutely nuthin’, and is a very silly modern addition in any case. Simply put, the frame adds nothing thematically to the main story: it neither adequately reflects nor expands on the main themes of the film, and as such, is more or less pointless. I was, however, glad to see Lindsay Duncan and the sublime and under-utilised Frances De La Tour (although as Bonham Carter herself has pointed out, Burton makes no concessions to an actress’s vanities!).

Someone in the group I saw it with said she kept waiting for the actors who played characters in the frame scenes to pop up in Underland (which is apparently its real name, misheard by the child-Alice—I actually quite liked that innovation). Apart from two non-identical twins who were meant to echo Tweedledee and Teedledum, this doesn’t happen, and I’m glad of it. I think it’s a weak point of the film of The Wizard of OZ, having characters in OZ played by the same actors as Dorothy’s friends and family in Kansas, suggesting as it does that it was, after all, “just a dream”. (I’m sure this is original to the film, but I haven’t read the book since 197-gulp, so someone will have to remind me if I’m wrong.) I liked that W/underland is real and that Alice THOUGHT it was a dream, and I’m glad she gets to remember it at the end. (I did think, for a moment, though, that Dorothy’s red shoes might make an appearance… if you’ve seen the film, you may know the moment to which I refer.)

In fact there was quite a lot I did like about the film—Johnny Depp, who is always worth watching, makes a terrific Hatter, as expected (and what did everyone else think of the use of the raven and the writing-desk riddle as a sort of refrain between him and Alice?). Anne Hathaway as the faux-affected White Queen was very amusing (and I don’t think Wonderland is going to be all that better off under her rule rather than her sister’s, actually!). Alan Rickman’s sinuous voice for the Caterpillar was marvellous (although I am still a bit puzzled why so many of the characters got names—the Caterpillar is Absolom, amongst others, and I don’t geddit…) I was a bit disappointed in the Cheshire Cat (despite my eternal adoration for Stephen Fry), not sure why, and the poor White Rabbit was reduced to a cowardly wreck, which he’s not. Bonham Carter is fine as the Red Queen, and comparisons to Miranda Richardson’s “Queenie” in Blackadder are, I think, unfair if inevitable. (Bonham Carter’s Red Queen does owe a great debt to the historical Elizabeth I, though, I would say, especially as far as ERI’s penchant for favourites is concerned. And didn’t Miranda Richardson once play the Red Queen? Oh yes, here it is—Queen of Hearts. Hhmmm… now I’m confused. Is Bonham Carter’s character the Queen of Hearts from Wonderland or the Red Queen from Through the Looking Glass or an amalgamation of the two? Curiouser and curiouser!)

Mia Wasikowska is a wonderful young actress, as anyone who saw her in In Treatment will know, and she’s perfectly fine in this role. She’s not the Alice we all know, of course—her Alice is a rather worldly young woman, not Carroll’s “dream-child”—but a completely original character who better suits the modern, feminist sensibility I mentioned earlier. Whether or not any of that works for you?—well, tell me in the comments.

The film has Burton’s characteristic “look”, and at times I did find it a bit on the dark side (actually, not metaphorically, although that too—the heads in the moat bringing to creepily literal life the Queen’s trademark cry “Orf with their heads!”) and I also found it quite hard to hear what people were saying at times. (Most of those afore-mentioned new character names were lost on me. And again, I think they were unnecessary.) It was Wonderland meets Corpse Bride via Coraline as far as the set design goes, which I guess is to be expected (although I note that Burton was not involved in Coraline, but its director, Henry Selick, worked on The Nightmare Before Christmas with Burton).

 

But frankly, I’d rather have seen Burton’s take on the original Alice story. He clearly knows it intimately, or his screenwriter does (the detail of the film proves this), and has an empathy with for its darker, surreal moods, so why not just let him have his not inconsiderable head with Carroll’s world and see what he came up with? Alice doesn’t need modernising—she’s a girl for the ages, as so many pre-adolescent heroines of children’s literature are, from Alice through Anne Shirley and Judy Woolcot to Lucy Pevensie and Calpurnia Tate—before puberty and the imperatives of potential womanhood begin to hit home.

So no, I didn’t hate it. I liked a lot about it. I’ll see it again (I didn’t see it in 3D and actually, I feel absolutely no desire to) and probably buy the DVD. It’s not terrible, but we’re still waiting for an imagination to match Carroll’s to really bring Alice to the big screen.

Whither the Children’s Book? From the Vault: Wednesday, June 15 2011

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This post was first published in June 2011, but it’s as relevant as the day I wrote it. Just this weekend, in fact, I read a review which described  Neil Gaiman‘s Fortunately, The Milk, as being for ‘the younger end of the YA readership’. Um, no. That would be CHILDREN. Remember them? They’re not mini-teenagers. They’re children and so there are children’s books and let us not forget it. Anyway, here’s my rant from 2 years ago. Consider it current.

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I first used this phrase (Whither the Children’s Book?) in my blog post about this year’s (2011) Sydney Writers’ Festival in context of the panel I chaired on the young adult/adult cross-over novel that was, rather ironically I thought, called “When is a children’s book not a children’s book” (ironic, because it wasn’t about children’s books at all). This is what I wrote:

given the title, I also brought in the question of Whither the
Children’s Book in a world when YA and the cross-over gets all the attention

but to be honest, we didn’t really answer the question. I think, from memory, we all kind of agreed that children’s books don’t get much attention and then moved on to questions.

Because not a lot seems to be about the children’s book, these days. The children’s novel, to be precise. YA gets vastly more of the blog space, media attention and arguably, reviews—although the picture book probably gets a fair bit of review space as well (and Shaun Tan’s done a hell of a lot to make the picture book an acceptable topic of conversation in adult society). And increasingly, I’ve noticed that when a children’s novel does get critical attention, it’s suddenly claimed as being young adult.

It happened to The Graveyard Book. It happened to When You Reach Me. And these are both classics examples of children’s literature, as far as I am concerned. I’ve argued the toss on this online and elsewhere, especially about The Graveyard Book, which people seem to want to claim as YA primarily, I think, because it deals with death and because of the extremely scary opening scene where the family is murdered (oh shut up, that’s not a spoiler). My argument about The Graveyard Book is this: it ends at the point where most YA takes up: Bod has to leave the graveyard to find his agency, and we don’t get to see that process. The rest of the novel—Bod finding who he is in the context of the only family he knows, through adventures that are often perilous, coupled with the exploration of friendship—is the classic stuff of the children’s novel.

The claim for When You Reach Me as YA puzzles me even more. Thematically, it shares nothing in common with the typical YA novel, but is firmly in the tradition of the great children’s novels—Harriet the Spy, A Wrinkle in Time. Andre Norton‘s Octagon Magic springs to mind for some reason. I’m also thinking of The Game of the Goose and the lesser known The Games Board Map—children’s novels with a puzzle to be solved at the heart. There’s no subtext of the achieving of subjectivity, such a classic feature of the YA novel. These are all novels about children, with the concerns of children at their heart—friendship and family and belonging and home.

(For the record, I had a conversation about this with Rebecca Stead at Reading Matters last month, and she is firmly of the opinion that she writes children’s novels—and she says the letters she gets from her readers bears this out. So there.)

The only thing I can put the claim for such books to be YA down to is this—that they are books that are literary, meta-textual, substantial books full of ideas and complex plotting. They’re books that need time to read and consider and digest—books that take, as a frustrated parent of a frustrated 12 year old reader once said to me, longer than an afternoon to read. But complex doesn’t ergo mean older.

It’s as if we’ve all forgotten what kind of books we read as children. It’s as if the whole rich heritage of 20th century children’s literature has become some kind of quaint historical anomaly. It seems to me that the huge emphasis on writing and publishing books for “reluctant readers” (often code for “boys”) over the past 20 years has pushed the classic children’s novel so far out of our collective consciousness that we don’t even recognise it when we see it any more. If it’s longer than 200 pages, if it has serious ideas and challenging language, it has to be for young adults—almost seemingly regardless of the age of the protagonists and the thematic interests of the story. And it bothers me enormously that the gifted, devoted, passionate child reader doesn’t seem worthy of our attention any more.

Why am I banging on about this all of a sudden? There are two reasons: first, a long-standing concern and second, something I read today that really got up my nose. Here’s the first: the second will come right at the end of this post.

Reason for Banging On the First.

Well, first of all, the near-demise of the children’s novel, in this country at least, has been a concern of mine for more than a decade. It’s not just that YA is sexy and dark and dangerous and so excites the blood of the “won’t someone think of teh children” brigade (and yes, I get the irony that here they’re actually NOT talking about children at all, but treating young adults as if they WERE children) and so gets all the media attention. (No, I will NOT link to the notorious Wall Street Journal article; that damn woman has had far more than her 15 minutes of attention and I won’t be party to giving her a second more. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, google WSJ and dark and young adult and you’ll find it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.) It’s more that the categories—children’s and young adult—seem to have been pushed so far apart from one another, in awards in particular, that there seems to be this huge gaping space into which the children’s novel, as we have known and loved it for about 150 years, has fallen.

If you’re not sure what I’m taking about, go to the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s website and compare the shortlists for the Book of the Year Award either before there was a split between Older and Younger Readers categories, or even in the early years of separation of the age categories. Look at the books shortlisted in the 60s, 70s and even 80s for the 8-12 year old reader (what the Americans usefully call “middle school”) compared to the Younger Readers shortlists of the past 10-15 years. Note how these days, there’s only one or two really substantial novels for this age (what I’ve always thought of the “golden years” of reading), with the rest of the shortlist made up of short, illustrated chapter books, typically for the under 8 years olds, and even picture books.

I’m not saying that those other books, the chapter books and more sophisticated picture books, are bad books or should not have been selected as books of merit—I just look at those lists and wonder where are all the great novels for children? Isn’t anyone writing them any more? Or is no-one publishing them any more?

Over the years, I’ve heard different views on this from Australian publishers. A decade ago, they were telling me they weren’t publishing them because they couldn’t sell them—apparently schools and libraries wanted the inheritors of the Paul Jennings phenomena; Aussie Bitesand books with a wider market appeal—and it wasn’t economical to publish literary fiction for that age. So the readers, like the child of that parent I mentioned earlier, who I spoke to when I was working in a children’s book shop who said he his daughter needed books that lasted longer than an afternoon—those readers either had to buckle down and read more mature fare that they weren’t really ready for, or stick with the classics, or read books from the US or UK, where they still seemed to be publishing real novels for the devoted child reader.

More recently, they tell me that the problem is that writing a really great children’s novel is incredibly difficult, and they just don’t see the quality manuscripts. Australian publishers tell me this; and Amanda Punter, the Penguin UK publisher on that Sydney Writers’ Festival panel, said it too. I just remembered! Yes! That was pretty much the answer to my question—Whither the Children’s Book? It’s hard to do well, and we’d publish more if we saw more of them.

Maybe that’s true—I suspect there is some truth to it. I can’t imagine the level of gift it would take to write a Hazel Green novel or a Tom’s Midnight Garden. But it’s an odd argument at the point that once upon a time there weren’t really any YA novels and plenty of wonderful children’s novels—has it somehow become harder to write a great children’s novel, or have writers turned their attention to other audiences?

What I am sure is true is that there are vastly more books published for young readers now, a greater variety and indeed, I’ve argued that there are more books for different kinds (and abilities) of young readers than ever before, and that’s a great thing. (I made that point in answer to a question at the Sydney Story Factory panel on children and writing at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and I think it’s true.) So maybe it’s just that there are more books vying for incrementally less and less attention (see another recent post where I mentioned the shrinking of book review pages across the board in mainstream newspapers and the like).

But I can’t help but think that there are fewer contemporary children’s novels of the type you and I grew up devouring, and that’s emphatically not a good thing. And to circle back to my previous point, for some reason when we do see those books, they somehow get shanghaied as young adult. Which they’re just not. Which brings me to:

Reason for Banging On the Second.

This blog review of Oliver Phommavanh‘s second (and very wonderful) children’s novel Con-Nerd, in which our goodly blogger describes this book and others of its ilk as “young-young adult”.

Yup, you read it right. “Young-young adult.”

Is that really what we’re calling it now?

Heaven help me.

I don’t mean to have a go at you, goodly Alpha Reader blogger, but for god’s sake. It’s not “young-young adult”. There’s no such THING as “young-young adult.” It’s a children’s novel. A novel for children. There are still children in the world and they still need novels.

So maybe, after all, I am saying, will no-one think of teh children? But more than that—will no-one think of teh children’s book?

Thrilled Me, Silenced Me, Stilled Me

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Sinead O’Connor has been in the press again today (October 2013), kicking up a stink, alienating people left, right and centre, as she is wont to do. It put me in mind of this piece I wrote back when I saw her in concert in Sydney in 2008.

I’m not ashamed to say I wept back then, when at last, 21 years after I first heard her music, I saw her perform live. I love her, like Emma Thompson in Love, Actually, loves Joni Mitchell. Flaws and all. She’s my girl.

Originally published Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at misrule.com.au/s9y

As I was leaving work today, our fabby young admin support guy, Ben, was playing—get this—Boz Scaggs on his computer. So I stopped for a chat and a groove (come on, Boz was pretty groovy in the day!) and it turned out that the CD belonged to Jean, one of our colleagues who is, I suppose, about the same age as my older sister, Linda, who owned a copy of Silk Degrees back when, well, Boz was groovy.

Jean started reminiscing about listening to Boz Scaggs when she was travelling around after finishing her HSC and we talked about how music comes to mean something more than itself when it becomes attached to a certain time in our life.

And then tonight, 20 years after I first heard “Mandinka” and bought a copy of The Lion and the Cobra, I heard Sinead O’Connor in concert.

I didn’t take my eyes off her for an hour and a half.

She’s tiny, and a little round these days from her four babies, and the top register of voice showed the wear of a year-long concert tour (this was the last concert) but, oh, when she opened her diaphragm and that voice came out… Oh that voice! It filled the State Theatre and it filled me up too.

I have always loved Sinead O’Connor, her contrariness and rage and compassion and feminist faith—and her songs. Her voice.

She started with “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and went into “I Am Stretched On Your Grave” and I don’t remember what else after that, except she played lots of old songs (some I had forgotten, like “Fire On Babylon”) and a few from her new album, Theology (which I bought last week and listened to over Easter). Lots from I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got (which I am playing as I write this)—”The Last Day Of Our Acquaintance” nearly killed me, as it always does (as does “Three Babies”, which I hadn’t realised was a waltz, which somehow makes it even more sadly beautiful). Oh yeah, and of course she did “Nothing Compares 2 U”, which has never been a particular favourite of mine (not compared to “Troy” or “Jackie” or “Mandinka”—which she didn’t do, alas—or “Acquaintance”), but it was fabulous live.

She had a wonderful band—the feedback was obviously bothering her at times, but they sounded great most of the time. I hadn’t realised how tricky some of her rhythms are until I heard and watched the drummer. The violinist brought that amazing Irish sound to so many songs. I love that. And it was astonishing to me how Sinead would pull away from the mic and her voice was just as full and powerful as if it were still up close.

There was a young Irish couple sitting next to me. I did wonder what they made of the middle-aged single chick grooving away in her seat (you’re not allowed to get up and dance in the State Theatre, you see), but what the hell—maybe they didn’t really notice.

And then, during the encore, during “Black Boys on Mopeds” to be precise—I was leaning forward and singing along without making a noise, if you know what I mean—the woman of the Irish couple touched my arm and handed me a pair of binoculars. And so I watched Sinead sing the last verse of “Black Boys” close up. And burst into tears.

Me, not Sinead.

It was a little embarrassing, I admit. I did that waving-the-hand-in-front-of-the-face to indicate “sorry, I’m crying!” when I handed the binoculars back and they were so sweet. When the lights came up I was still all damp (well, she finished with a song that was a goodnight prayer for godssakes!) and I turned to them and said “thank you—I’ve been waiting twenty years for that!” “You looked like you were enjoying it!” they said, which was hilarious because I was in fact this weeping mess. I had to duck my head all the way out of the theatre so as for people not to see me all teary and ridiculous.

I don’t know why I got so emotional. It’s not even as if I’ve listened to her all that much in recent years, apart from the new album, but listening to her tonight, live and now at home, I realise how much those songs, her voice, have got into my bones. That voice is so familiar to me—so is that face. Thus the weeping binocular moment! She wore a blue scarf on her head—a bit like an old-fashioned nun, actually—and seeing her face close up, she’s still so very beautiful, and so familiar—and in her daggy old jeans and unflattering t-shirt, how “ordinary”!

I guess the thing is when a musician (as opposed to a celebrity) is important to us in some way over the years, and especially one whose life and lyrics have been laid so bare, we do feel like we somehow know them. (I’ll talk but you won’t listen to me. I know your answer already.)

And how contemporary are the lyrics to “Black Boys”, even decades after the Thatcher era:

These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to dig your own grave
‘Remember what I told you
if you were of the world they would love you’

I’m not going to read over this or I’ll be too embarrassed to post it!