Cover Charge #13: Alice In Wonderland

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Pagemaster

It's really appropriate that this is the thirteenth issue of Cover Charge, because both times I read Alice In Wonderland (a.k.a. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, or Alice's Adventures Under Ground, as it was called in its original manuscript form), I felt as if I had been cursed to die of annoyance and boredom with my brain pouring out of my ears. Whether because it simply melted from prolonged exposure to such pointless idiocy, or it fled in terror, piece by piece, from Lewis Carroll's most famous work occupying my short-term memory, I cannot begin to guess.

My issues with the book begin with Alice herself. I suppose it's to be expected of children of a certain age, but Alice is Dunning-Kruger personified. She's lazy, impatient, inconsiderate, self-important, violent toward animals, and so stupid that she thinks her own stupidity is the result of her being changed with someone stupider than herself (which I would have thought impossible if not for her being in Wonderland, where rabbits wear clothes, bugs do drugs, mice tell stories in their sleep, babies turn into pigs, cards play croquet with animals as equipment, birds make an elaborate dance out of throwing lobsters into space, you can dry off by discussing Victorian politics, incidental poetry is admissible as evidence in a court of law, and Time is a vindictive asshole, but I shall dye grass to avoid death by beheading).

By the way, anyone being stupider than Alice is the impossible thing, not the body-swapping, in case you didn't get that part.

I am not immune to puns (as my readers and co-workers know), nor to cartoonish slapstick or a well-crafted jab at poorly crafted government, and Alice In Wonderland has plenty of all three, plus a few tamely bawdy nonsense rhymes that I found momentarily amusing. But for anyone who is capable of accepting Alice as a protagonist and is expecting a coherent narrative at any given point (I'm fairly certain that the Venn diagram for this set is a blank sheet of polka-dot wrapping paper), the "story" reads like the script for a lost Monty Python movie that Terry Gilliam wrote when someone swapped his Ritalin with a blend of controlled stimulants. It's basically Alice getting big or small to do various things (because it seems Carroll and Caterpillar weren't the only ones partaking of magic pharmaceuticals), all progress grinding to a halt so she can listen to characters dump exposition on her that she asks inane, pedantic questions about until she gets bored and leaves, peppered with explanations of the tedious rules of elaborate games, and padded with needless poetry and song lyrics that have Jack to do with Sprat, and therefore lack any fat.

And to really put the buffalo patty on this impressionistic Nothing-Burger of a shit sandwich...

It literally feels like Alice Liddell had Lewis Carroll tell her a focus-grouped bedtime story about herself making anthropomorphic animals and objects tell her a random series of focus-grouped (but unfinished, because editorial interference is the enemy of coherence and completion) stories that weren't good or sensical enough to sustain a long-form narrative on their own, and collectively still managed to fall short. To paraphrase Carroll himself, Alice In Wonderland "seemed...to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English."

F+

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Pagemaster,

Flipping Out.