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.