Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking-Glass

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A young girl named Alice tours the river with her two sisters and lays bored along the riverbanks when she sees an oddity in the scenery, that of a white rabbit wearing a coat and staring at a pocket watch as if late for an appointment. Her curiosity brings her to a rabbit hole where she falls down and finds herself in front of a tiny door that her size wouldn’t allow her to enter. Taking advice from a bottle with a note that says “Drink Me” scribbled on it, she finally enters the door. What follows is a series of growing and shrinking by way of eating and drinking certain food and drinks in the strange new world she finds herself in. Along the way she meets a variety of weird creatures such as talking animals, insects, and a pack of humanoid cards led by a Queen of Hearts that has an obsession for beheading her constituents.

What a ridiculously entertaining literary work! It is fun to read alright but it doesn’t make much sense, which is to be expected because this is the kind of tale that you conjure in your head spontaneously to shut your kids up by indulging their imagination. In this regard, it need not make sense. It simply has to be enjoyable and as weird as it could be. This isn’t the first time that I have read this Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass combo, but every time I do read it, there is always something new to discover. This time around, it seems as though I enjoyed the word play more than anything else.

While much of Carroll’s prose comes across as gibberish, many of them are actually wordplay, mostly puns. This might be the reason why linguists tend to love this book as it basks in the intricacies of the English language. It pokes fun at the language while using the very same language and, in the process, turns into some sort of self-deprecating meta critique, becoming part of what it is supposed to be making fun of. If you are a language lover, then there is no reason for you not to enjoy this book. There are just too many lines you will be reading that are just begging to be read again sometimes for clarity, at times for greater appreciation.

If you are just a casual reader, then this might end up to be an annoying 200+ pages for you. Imagine having a conversation with a know-it-all toddler, seemingly endless, with your conversation partner mixing nonsense and some occasionally brilliant trace of witticism here and there. The storyline is simple enough to follow and has a very trippy quality to it, owing to the premise which is basically a young girl’s summer daydream. Should the plot be a turnoff for you, perhaps your pangs of nostalgia for your own carefree days of childhood might just do the trick for you. After all, every one of us was Alice with a hyper imagination when we were younger.

I’ve always thought that the two-book bundle sold in bookstores nowadays was just one novel. Apparently, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass were published seven years apart, the sequel coming to fruition thanks to great demand for a sequel. To make the distinction clearer, the first book focuses on the rabbit hole and Alice’s interaction with the murderous Queen of Hearts. On the other hand, the second book introduces the characters of Tweeddledum and Tweddledee, incorporates the Humpty Dumpty fairy tale, and plays out as a game of chess.

In any case, both books have this feverish hallucination vibes to it, and are branded as part of the “nonsense fiction” genre. As mentioned, though, I believe that there’s a lot of linguistic genius to discover underneath the absurdist surface of Carroll’s writing style, and it is the discovery thereof that makes this book a satisfying read. In a way I see it as some sort of communal reading that two different generations, more or less that of parent and child, can both enjoy while having different takeaways from it based on maturity level. It can be nonsense or societal critique, depending on how deep you are willing to dig.