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Alice's Journey Beyond the Moon
"annotated and edited" by by RJ Carter
illustrated by Lucy Wright
(Telos, £6.99, 91 pages, paperback, also available in deluxe,
signed and numbered hardback edition priced £30.00 published August
2004.)
Review by John Toon
Fictional accounts of Alice's Third Adventure are not exactly hard
to come by, and the great variety of style and content available  means
that we can pick and choose to please ourselves. There are faithful
homages for the traditionalists and promiscuous reimaginings for the
neophiles. So, just to get this out in the open, I'm a neophile, and
Alice's Journey Beyond the Moon is one for the traditionalists.
It's so traditional, it's rather preciously presented as Lewis Carroll's
lost manuscript "annotated and edited by RJ Carter". It's so traditional,
Carter acknowledges the help of a member of the Lewis Carroll Society
in ironing out "temporal anomalies" in his text, which I take to mean
biographical details.
Biographical what? You heard. This is where Alice's Journey
distinguishes itself from its peers--in the depth of its research. The
text is peppered with covert references to events in the lives of Carroll
and his muse, Alice Liddell, even to the tiniest trivia. Yes, it's a
very clever homage. But like too many deeply researched books, Alice's
Journey trumpets its cleverness in bragging displays of erudition
that detract from the story itself. Perhaps it's Carter's intention
specifically to mimic the annotated editions of Carroll's works, who
knows? And granted, the alternative would have been to have only the
scholars in the audience notice the sly nods and in-jokes. But isn't
this just as bad--a game for scholars that then tries to explain the
joke? A footnote on every page painfully detailing some throwaway phrase
you ought to recognise, boy, if you'd only done your homework?
The original tales, of course, can stand on their own merit irrespective
of whether or not you notice the social, mathematical and game-related
allusions. Shorn of its footnotes, Alice's Journey is something
of a mixed bag. Characters of Carter's own creation are few but, on
the whole, entertaining; better still are his Carrollian parodies of
nineteenth century children's verse. On the downside, Carter seems compelled
to shoehorn in as many characters from and gratuitous references to
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
as he possibly can, to the detriment of his own story. It soon becomes
a tiring checklist which, coupled with the relentless in-your-face research
dumping, kind of saps all the fun out of the enterprise. Credit must
go to Lucy Wright's illustrations for their valiant effort to maintain
some sort of levity during this otherwise cumbersome read.
In conclusion, ponderous. Alice's Journey should have striven,
like its forebears and like many of its fellows, to entertain first
and instruct second. I feel that Carter's done the opposite, and wrong-footed
himself in doing so.
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