A novelisation of the life of Alice Pleasance Liddell, widely considered the inspiration behind the title character of [Author: Lewis Carroll]’s two famous works [Book: Alice in Wonderland] and [Book: Alice Through the Looking Glass]

Disappointingly, this is yet another case of an American choosing to base their own work around a work of classic British literature and failing to do their homework. (See [Book: Dracula in Love] for an excellent example of this, if you are prepared to suffer).

I’m willing to overlook the general failure to create a Victorian tone or style, since this is in fairness a book created for entertainment rather than historical accuracy. But in turn I expect the author to avoid any glaring anachronisms that render the conceits of the text ridiculous. Sadly I got no further than the prologue before an elderly Alice Hargreaves (née Liddell), writing in 1932, says “I am tired of being Alice, period;” which is a ridiculously modern and American sentence not only in its structure and style but also in its vocabulary, since British people say “Full Stop” rather than “Period.” It’s as incongruous as having Alice say she’s “Like, totally not into being Alice anymore.” In the same chapter the author also falls prey to the temptation to laud her own country through the mouth of the character she is currently puppeteering (again, see [Book: Dracula in Love], which is crass and unnecessary and serves to yet further break down the idea of the narrator as an historical person, as distinct from the self-serving author.

After this excellent beginning, the novel proceeds much as expected. In Part One Alice narrates her childhood experiences with Charles Lutwidge Dodgson / Lewis Carroll, maintaining throughout the style of either an unrealistically and unpleasantly precocious child or a dissembling faux-naïf old woman. Considering that she began the book professing to be sick of the Alice in Wonderland phenomenon it seems strange that the manner in which she describes herself as a child apes that of Dodgson/Carroll’s depiction of her in his two “Alice” novels so self-consciously. This curious approach to the telling of the tale is presumably a symptom of either Alice’s neuroses or the author’s limited abilities. At any rate the result is that Alice never convinces as a real child, denying the book any effective emotional centre. Meanwhile, Benjamin continuously beats the reader about the head with her metaphors. If Alice feels an obstacle between herself and her mother she will stand with a thick wooden door between them and comment on the symbolism. If Alice is confused about how to express her feelings she will write scores of letters on the subject and then crumple them up unsent. When Dodgson/Carroll finally tells his first “Alice” story we are left in no doubt of its significance by the half-dozen instances of its subject or author crying some variant of:

“If you write it down, I won’t grow up—ever! Of course, not truly, but in the story. I’ll always be a little girl, at least there, if you write it down. Could you?”

Subtlety is obviously not something Benjamin is familiar with, as is shown by her less than understated introduction of the changed adult Alice of Part 2

“Still, I couldn’t help but feel as if I was being watched, as I’d been watched ever since I was a little girl playing croquet with my sisters in the garden. Only I wasn’t a little girl anymore. And my games were much more complicated.”

This section, as is usual in historical texts set in Europe and written by Americans, focuses on the nearest royal family. In this case Alice’s relationship with Prince Leopold is the pretext, and he is presented as a suitor whose attempts at wooing are sadly stymied by the weight of Alice’s past, which in another example of Benjamin’s metaphor-creating talent are too heavy for Leopold’s slender hands to bear. Meanwhile Alice continues to talk at great length about her dual existence, as both a real woman and a fictional child, mainly by balding stating this concept over and over again. Between these ramblings she becomes involved with a demented version of John Ruskin, who seems likely to ruin her happiness with her beloved Leo through his rather randomly focused insanity. Eventually the golden-haired Prince Charming decides for some reason to ask his Mama for permission to marry Alice through the medium of a letter of recommendation from crazy Mr Ruskin. For some reason he reveals some secrets regarding Dodgson/Carroll’s erstwhile unsavoury attachment to Alice, despite this being clearly against his best interests, and the relationship between Alice and Prince Leo is broken, His Flowery Highness’ desperate Mills and Boon style romantic outbursts proving not strong enough to defeat the forces of conventionality forcing them apart, etc.

Meanwhile Alice’s younger sister, and apparent only friend in the world, conveniently falls in love with the man whose manor house she has admired since she was a child, thereby absolving herself of the accusation that she might marry for money and stability, like every other Victorian lady of her time. She then promptly dies at precisely the same time as Alice loses her lover, the two tragedies mirroring each other in a ridiculously convenient manner. At the funeral of said sister, Alice realises that for reasons of dramatic convention she will never see her one true love again. Part Two draws to a close on this melodramatic scene.

Part Three begins in 1914, in order that the onset of the First World War can be used for more historical framing. Alice is now married to a man she doesn’t love, and has three sons who mirror her and her two relevant siblings in their characters for reasons of novelistic balance. We also learn that she has never read either of the “Alice” because of the soap operatic trauma they cause her whenever she comes into contact with them. The purpose of this set-up is to mine the death of two of Alice’s sons for further tragic import, which is duly done. Benjamin also shows herself up once again by failing to realise that nobody in England uses the word “normalcy”, even though it is apparently ubiquitous in the USA. Alice moans on about how difficult it is to get good servants now that so many men have been killed in the War, and how inappropriate it is that her precious sons’ names should be on the same monument to the dead as those of the lower classes; this doesn’t help make her character any more sympathetic. A chapter is dedicated to her real-life sale of the original [Book: Alice Underground] manuscript, motivated by financial difficulties but here invested with much woolly symbolism.

It’s at around this time that the book seems to suddenly take a detour into self-parody. Alice lambasts those trying to tell her life story:

Really, the impertinence of these people! They made my whole life sound like a cheap novel. What business was it of theirs?

She then suddenly turns from outpourings about how Dodgson/Carroll ruined her life through the unspecified horrors to which he subjected her to stating that nothing ever happened between them except a kiss instigated by her. The prurient minds of her cold mother, jealous older sister and the public at large are now the principle cause of all her problems. This sudden change of direction leaves the reader rather uncertain how to take the novel at hand, since it has taken to criticising itself in a manner either meta-textual or self-deluding.

Besides the haphazard structure, lack of believable characterisation, heavy-handed metaphor and general lack of focus, there is one further reason I dislike this book. The author has chosen to frame Alice Pleasance Liddell’s life as one of blighted innocence leading to tragedy and finally redemption. Not only is this hackneyed beyond belief, shored up with over-used plot-devices such as the death of a son at war finally bringing his parents together, but I find the central conceit flawed. Benjamin, apparently unable to demonstrate through Alice’s character or actions the effects of her strange childhood, resorts to having a single event represent all the loss, pain and confusion she has suffered. This event is her failure to marry Prince Leopold. In order to make this significant, said prince is presented as a paragon of virtue, and their love as a meeting of two people made for each other, who can only be truly whole when they are together. The whole thing feels lifted from a cheap romance novel. The language is ridiculous, the events are unlikely, the set-up trite, and in consequence Part Two seems not to fit with the sections that proceed and succeed it. Alice’s whole life is reduced to one man, an idealised true-love who was too good for her and this world. With this gaping hollow where the heart of the story should be, little wonder that the novel as a whole seems so lifeless.