Maguire’s usually brilliant imagination for adaptation seems to be missing in his retelling of Alice in Wonderland, which left me far less impressed than all of his other books that I’ve read–including the young adult titles. Wicked masterfully reimagined the Oz tales from the antagonist’s point of view, Mirror Mirror left me in awe (and sometimes disgust) because of the dwarfs he created, and Lost was an emotional adventure with light touches of fictional and mythological intertextuality.
After Alice was just cute, with great attention to detail and an interweaving of historically accurate elements into the narrative.
Rather than a reimagining of Alice’s trip through Wonderland, Maguire attempts to recreate Alice’s backstory and perhaps to understand the original author’s motivations. He writes extensively about Cambridge during the era, Alice’s family and the other people who might have lived nearby, the parks and buildings associated with and surrounding the university, and the social rules of the time.
He also dips into metanarrative philosophizing, the high point of which was an entertaining musing on the cook of Alice’s household. We are told that she will never know anything about famous characters like Jay Gatsby, James Bond, or Captain Jas. Hook. “They are yet to be imagined. In any case, Mrs. Brummidge doesn’t read fiction. She hasn’t the patience for it.”
And although tongue-in-cheek humor like this is used throughout, there are some serious and even disturbing parts to the story. These mostly revolve around death, one of life’s big questions, for sure, and the children protagonists’ means of processing the loss of those they loved.
This aspect of growing up was the most complicated (and unsatisfying, from this reader’s point of view) for Siam. He was a former slave in the American South who experienced death in a traumatic way before being taken to England by his guardian. His treatment in the narrative, although historically accurate, left me feeling uneasy–especially at the resolution of his story.
Overall, I saw Maguire’s skill in this Alice adaptation, but I didn’t understand his vision.
