The message of Northanger Abbey: is there one?

What to make of Northanger Abbey? I reread it this year as I planned to do as part of the Jane Austen Rereading Project and was pleasantly surprised, as it was more enjoyable than I remembered it. I've said before that it's my least favourite Austen novel, but I'm not so sure now: with its wealth of dialogue, it's a livelier read than the exposition-heavy Sense and Sensibility. It's also less of a critique/parody of the Gothic genre than I expected - the main plot is a straightforward Austenesque one hinging on how the heroine manages to bag her man. But this is what's so puzzling about it. Since most of the story is in no way dependent on the whole Gothic novel context, why bother with it in the first place?

The two TV adaptations of Northanger I've seen have both played up the protagonist Catherine Moreland's propensity for daydreaming. Her dreams and fantasies, where the people she meets in real life are cast in various Gothic-novel parts, are contrasted with her more humdrum reality. In fact, the novel's Catherine isn't as big a fantasist as all that. It's only for a comparatively short section of the book, when she is staying at Northanger Abbey itself, that she believes herself caught up in a Gothic mystery. During all the time she stays in Bath with her friends the Allens she has no exalted expectations of great adventures. Moreover, aside from making a friend of the mercenary flirt Isabella Thorpe - an error of judgement which is totally understandable in a seventeen-year-old, especially as the Thorpes are for a time the only acquaintances the Allens have in town - Catherine behaves pretty sensibly in Bath. She quickly realises that Isabella's brother John, in spite of being the friend of her own brother James, is someone whose company is to be avoided as much as possible. In spite of the Thorpeses' best efforts, she manages to make the better acquaintance of Henry Tilney (her love interest) and his sister Eleanor (too sensible to be much fun at this stage). She quickly notices something is off when Isabella, by this time betrothed to James, starts flirting with Henry Tilney's brother. When she voices her concerns to Henry, he waves them away, but in time Catherine is proven to be right: Isabella's association with Captain Tilney does lead to (an implied) scandal.

In fact, when Austen contrasts Gothic novel clichés with Catherine's reality in the first half of the novel, it's not the heroine's expectations she's puncturing but the reader's. This soon gets a little wearisome, especially if you didn't expect a Gothic yarn to begin with or in fact don't have much conception of what a Gothic yarn is like. It's a problem for me - and I suspect many a modern reader -that I have very little knowledge of the kind of book Austen's supposedly parodying. The more she concentrates on what does happen in Catherine's life, without pointing out how different this is from what would have happened in a Gothic novel, the better Northanger Abbey works for me.

So what does Austen want to say when she's sending up the Gothic novel? That you shouldn't confuse fiction with reality? It always makes me impatient when a novel preaches the importance of keeping fiction and reality apart, because the novel's reality is, of course, also a fiction. The unrelenting misery of the ending of Flaubert's Madame Bovary is as much of a construct as a happily-ever-after would have been, and some of the characters - ruthless merchant, womanising local squire - are types you'd be much more likely to come across within the pages of a novel than in a real small town in 19th century France. What's more, there's something disloyal about a novel that aims to show the dangerous influence of novels on impressionable minds. Jane Austen herself claims, in a defence of the novel which can be found in Northanger Abbey: "I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding". Is she as good as her word, though?

If there's a moral lesson to be learned in Catherine's mistakes, it is a pretty confused one, for in a way, she is vindicated. Her greatest fault is believing that Henry's father, General Tilney, did away with his wife or has her secretly locked up. This isn't true, and Catherine is suitably mortified when Henry guesses what she has been thinking. But the General is still the villain of the piece - he is a domestic tyrant, he throws Catherine out of his house when he discovers that she isn't the heiress he thought she was, and there's much to indicate that he was as impatient with his deceased wife as he is with his children. He expects his offspring to marry into money, more or less pimps Henry to Catherine as long as he thinks she's an heiress, and probably married money himself. Catherine leaping to the conclusion that the General is a murderer on scant evidence is very silly, but not as silly as if the General, in spite his formidable manners, had turned out to be a good egg after all.

The Introduction of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Northanger Abbey argues that the novel is in fact a subtle defence of the Gothic novel, and that Catherine's adventures do in fact have a flavour of the Gothic. The General's character is a case in point. As for the "rational" Henry Tilney, he is a mansplaining idiot (this is more elegantly expressed, of course). It's easy to agree with the opinion that Henry's protests against Catherine's imaginings sound hollow. His argument is that such things would never happen in England, with its admirable laws and institutions etc. This means that he's not really defending the General at all - he's saying that his country, not his father, is too civilised for anything too Gothic to take place. Which apart from being insulting to the General is a pretty dumb argument in itself as the most spectacular crimes can happen in the most well-ordered of societies.

However, I'm not sure I completely buy the argument that Austen is defending the Gothic novel as an art form that may contain a kernel of truth in spite of its sensationalism. It is she, not the reader, who has been scathing about Gothic clichés in the first place - what's the point of knocking down the pieces she herself has set up? The surface contradictions of Northanger Abbey may contain a message of some kind - say, that the relationship between reality and fiction is too complicated to be summed up in "novels are a trusty guide to explaining real life" or "novels are nothing like real life". But there is another possibility. Austen was a master craftswoman, but this is after all the first full-length novel she wrote. She may have started it intending it to be a parody of a Gothic novel, then not found the exercise interesting enough. While writing, she then gravitated more and more towards the kind of psychological realism - with a good deal of romance thrown in - that would become her trademark. Even the brightest authors don't always have a master plan - sometimes they just make things up as they go along. Northanger Abbey may not be trying to tell us anything in particular about "good" novels, "bad" novels and ordinary life after all.

Doctor Who series eleven: the Doc's not dead yet

Well, that could have been a lot worse. I recently finished watching series eleven of Doctor Who (except the new year special which isn't out on DVD yet) and found myself, surprisingly, not hating it. I had grave misgivings about this series: I didn't like the idea of a female Doctor, I wasn't a fan of the new show runner Chris Chibnall, and I found the way the series was marketed grating. In the end, though, although I'm not bowled over by it, it exceeded my expectations.

The quality of the episodes, though uneven, is by no means uniformly bad. The two first episodes were fine - not spectacular, but good entertainment. I especially liked "The Ghost Monument", with its satisfyingly alien world and Art Malik's enjoyable guest turn as the high-handed runner of a space race. Then the series hit something of a rough patch. The premise of the third episode ”Rosa”, where the Doctor and her team has to protect a small but important historical event from outward interference, isn’t bad in itself. What you could call the Sliding Doors theory of history, where small changes in the past can knock history seriously off course, usually provides entertaining time-travel plots. Not this time, though, as the sci-fi part of the story takes a back seat (no pun intended). It’s hard to quarrel with the episode’s message – segregation laws bad, Rosa Parks’s protest good – but it’s conveyed rather heavy-handedly. Every white person the Doctor and Co. meet is an eye-rolling, overacting racist, and every point is hammered home.  Vinette Robinson is a good Rosa Parks, though: her weariness, stemming from having to watch her step and keep her head down every blessed day of the week, feels very convincing.

At least “Rosa” is well-intentioned. There's no excuse for “Arachnids in the UK” whatsoever. The threat is dumb – spiders grown unnaturally large by “toxic waste”? Is this a children’s cartoon from the Seventies? The Doctor’s squeamishness about killing said spiders outright is inexplicable – would she object to squashing a normal-sized spider in a bath, then? The solution she and her friends come up with instead is basically an “out of sight, out of mind” one which will end with the spiders dead anyway, only it will be slower. And then there’s Robertson, an American hotel magnate and presidential candidate who barks “you’re fired!” at a new employee… Yeah, they went there. Even if the Trump caricature had been done with Yes Minister-like finesse, it would have been out of place in a Doctor Who adventure. As it is, the episode takes a cheap shot at a goodish-sized target and manages to miss it completely. Robertson may be a one-dimensional bastard, but unlike the Donald, he is crushingly predictable, which would make him a pretty safe incumbent of the White House. Plus he has the right idea about those spiders.

After the just about OK "The Tsuranga Conundrum" the series picked up with two strong installments - "The Demons of Punjab" and "Kerblam!" - which where not at all what I'd expected them to be. "The Demons of Punjab" is set during the Partition of India, but the focus is an intimate family drama. Context is provided by conflicts within the Indian population rather than moaning about the awful Brits, and there's not a tropical-helmeted Colonel in sight. "Kerblam!" takes place at what's basically Amazon in space, and I braced myself for a lecture about the evils of commercialism. That's not what the adventure's about, however: instead, it's a fun caper full of surprising twists and turns.

"The Witchfinders" was another dip for me, though as it took itself less seriously than "Rosa" I somehow minded it less. I’ve had a soft spot for Alan Cumming since he played Boris, one of my all-time favourite Bond villains, in Goldeneye. So I was disappointed at first when Cumming camped it up as King James I – just because a king has male lovers doesn’t mean he’s a pantomime dame. All the same, Cumming’s campiness may have saved King James from having even a harder time. If the part had been played with Iain Glen-like grimness, the two character moments which the king is allowed would have had more impact, but at the same time all the “burn the witches” stuff would have seemed more sinister, and the companions would probably not have ended up amiably chewing the fat with him in the end scene. Not exactly a fair portrayal of the king who smoothly succeeded Elizabeth I, brokered a peace with Spain and commissioned an ace Bible translation – whatever James I was, I suspect he was no fool – but it could have been worse. Oh, and Siobhan Finneran (alias Miss O’Brien) as a paranoid estate owner acts everyone else off set. Could we have her in the Downton movie, please?

Then came "It Takes You Away" – which was amazing! Mirror portals, parallel worlds, characters having to face loved ones seemingly back from the dead and having to figure out whether they're real or fake... my geeky heart soared. This had the true Who feel, and even though the series finale was tepid, I found myself cautiously looking forward to series twelve. On the subject of the finale, though, it does contain one of my least favourite plot clichés: the one where a good character is tempted to kill a bad character out of revenge, then is persuaded that he's "better than that", then subjects the bad character to an even worse punishment than death would have been. But it's OK, as the goodie didn't get blood on his hands. For pity's sake (literally), just kill the guy, you wuss!

I'm still far from convinced by Chris Chibnall as show runner, but he did pick some good guest writers, and the main acting cast works well. Jodie Whittaker convinces as the Doctor – I don't think she will ever be my favourite, but she is suitably Doctorish as well as warm and engaging. The companions are likeable, too. Bradley Walsh nails it as retired bus driver Graham, the best-developed companion and a real sweetheart. His step-grandson Ryan, played by Tosin Cole, is disarmingly laid-back, and his and Graham's tentative bonding following the death of Graham's wife and Ryan's nan Grace suitably touching. Mandip Gill's apprentice policeman Yaz is, as has been commented on, under-developed, but she has potential. I really enjoyed the friendly dynamic between the companions – Ryan and Graham backing up Yaz when she tried to persuade a sceptical Doctor to go back in time so she could see her grandmother as a young woman was a sweet moment.

Having said all that, I do feel like some of the magic of the series is gone. Above all, it's not as clever as it used to be under brainbox Steven Moffat. With less brilliant banter and brain-twisting sci-fi concepts to distract one, the flaws of the series, which have always been there – a clunky political comment here, a certain sense of over-worthiness there – become more apparent. But it's still watchable, and as Chibnall settles in, I'm hoping he'll deign to use more familiar Doctor Who tropes, including some of its old villains (especially as he hasn't really managed to create impressive new ones this far). Perhaps the Master could come back, regenerated as a man again, thus flipping the Gomez-Capaldi dynamic? It would be nice if he still had that Scottish accent...   

There's something about Alice

So, here are a couple of things you may not know about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass if you've never actually read them but have seen various adaptations of them:

1) The Queen of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland never actually beheads anyone. She does shout "Off with his/her/their head/s!", but the King pardons anyone singled out in this way, and the Gryphon confirms that "they never executes nobody".

2) The Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen are not the same person. The Red Queen appears in Through the Looking Glass and is a typically dotty character who's completely unthreatening.

3) The Red Queen and the White Queen (also dotty) are not enemies.

4) Alice never slays, or indeed meets, a Jabberwock. She reads about it in a poem she finds in Through the Looking Glass.

5) Jabberwock is the monster, Jabberwocky the poem.

6) We never see Alice as a grown-up, and though a bright girl who takes things in her stride, she is no action heroine. She is not romantically linked to the Mad Hatter nor anyone else.

7) The two Alice books are supposed to describe her dreams and both end with Alice waking up.

In short, various works that have been inspired by or even claim to be adaptations of the Alice books take considerable liberties with their source material. The worst offender in my view in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland which has nothing whatsoever to do with the work on which it's based: it's more of a scrappy sort of sequel, but doesn't even work as that. A generic fantasy concept is forced onto Carroll's characters which doesn't fit at all. (I've not seen Alice Through The Looking Glass but I gather that has as little to do with the second Alice book as the first film had with the first.)

Others are more open with their Alice adventures being flights of fancy. In Once Upon A Time we ended up with two different versions of Wonderland - neither very faithful to the original, but enjoyable all the same. Second Wonderland's Alice, whose acquaintance we made in season seven, had an endearing quirkiness about her which in some way reminded one of the original, and there were several references to the books in her conversation which convinced at least me that the writers know them pretty well (I was particularly impressed with their picking up on Alice's penchant for orange marmalade). As for the first version of Wonderland, the Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts (Cora, also the Evil Queen's mum and the Miller's Daughter) were especially memorable, if a far cry from their "real" Wonderland counterparts.

In all these variations Alice is a grown-up, and in each case her adventures aren't dreams at all but real. The same is true of the heroine of Alice, a novel by Christina Henry who also uses Carroll's books as a starting point for her own fantastic tale.

For a while, I was in two minds about whether I liked this novel or not, and in some ways I still am. It starts in deep gloom, and I nearly gave up there and then, thinking "be so good as not to involve Carroll's poor Alice in your fantasy dystopias". The quality of the writing made me persevere, though, and once Henry's Alice and her fellow asylum inmate Hatcher (it took me an embarrassingly long time to make the connection to the Mad Hatter) have escaped from their prison and have started on their quest to defeat the Jabberwock/Jabberwocky, I enjoyed the story. At the same time the references to Carroll's books continued to rile me, as the dark fantasy setting bears abslutely no resemblance to Wonderland or the Looking-Glass World whatsoever. The characters with names/nicknames relating to the Alice books are usually crime bosses with an extra keen interest in exploiting girls. Even Burton's take on Alice seemed sweetly whimsical and faithful in comparison.

And yet - I can't quite claim that Henry uses the Alice books simply as a way to superficially dress up her own grim world. Alice herself reacts to events and characters with something of the same clear-eyed naïvety as the original, and the various shady people she comes across have something to tie them to their Wonderland counterparts, though it's not much. The Caterpillar is still patronising. The Walrus still has an appetite. And Cheshire smiles. I acknowledge that Henry would have had difficulty in telling the same story while removing all the Wonderland references. It's still a bit of an imposition, though.

The ending of the book was, to my mind, problematic. I disliked the way that Alice and Hatcher went from fantasy questers to avengers, cutting a bloody swathe through the Old City's Underworld. Moral indignation is, for me, one of the least relatable murder motives there is - give me good old lust, greed or personal revenge any time. In the end, there are only so many people that need to die for someone's personal gain: if on the other hand your mission is to rid the world of anyone you deem morally unfit, you can go on forever. It puzzled me how, when it comes to the final showdown between Alice and the Jabberwock, she clearly still thinks of herself as unsullied: "She would never comprehend the need to hurt those who never hurt her, the need to hate for the sake of hating." Er, remember that time you cut a man's throat and watched him slowly bleed to death? That's called hating, girl.

Also, said showdown with the Jabberwock and Alice's confrontation with the Rabbit, the man/beast who once took her prisoner (a not altogether convincing Big Bad - I'd have said the March Hare would have been a better fit), are a bit of an anticlimax after the way these two characters have been built up throughout the novel. The defeat of the Jabberwock isn't particularly clever and in no way more merciful than some straightforward snicker-snacking with a vorpal blade would have been. Yet, with all its faults, the novel has a strong redeeming feature: it's a good read. Plus, Cheshire is great. I've already ordered the sequel.

So, why is it so common for writers, filmmakers etc. to seek inspiration from the Alice books, when to a large extent they are going to do their own thing anyway? The answer is simple, really: the books are just that good. As anyone who has tried to retell an amazing dream which then only seems boring and disjointed knows, pulling off a truly intriguing dream narrative is no mean thing. And although Carroll's Alice never comes across a real antagonist, there is something unsettling about some of the adventures she goes through and the people she encounters (or hears about - like the Walrus and the Carpenter) which does lend itself to "dark" interpretations. For my part, I'm happy to go down a few more Alice-inspired rabbit holes - though I'd be grateful if people could tell their Red Queens from their Queens of Hearts.