Alice's Journey Beyond The Moon

Sequel.
Written by R.J. Carter.
Illustrated by Lucy Wright.
Published by Telos, 2004

Review:

Sequels by other hands are often tricky beasts and never more so than when, as here, presented with the central conceit that they are a "lost manuscript" by the original author. This, like other pretenders, is of course no such thing. It is a new story. The problem with it is that the pretence that it is a lost Carroll manuscript extends to a series of long footnotes explaining how the various jokes and whimsies fit into the lives and events surrounding both Dodgson and Alice Liddell. These footnotes are done in the style of "The Annotated Alice" side by side with the text. For example the footnotes to one of the poems (giving the recipe for a rather unusual pie) explain that the ingredient "wet collodian" was a photographic chemical with which Dodgson would have been familiar and the nonsense word "queechy" refers to a novel by Elizabeth Wetherell that he gave to his sister Henrietta on her twelfth birthday. The depth of research into Dodgson's life is impressive but as a literary device it all rapidly becomes rather tiresome and it's a good idea to read the book through and ignore the footnotes altogether until you have finished.
What, then, of the story itself? At ninety pages it's quite a thin tale but pastiches the style of Carroll quite well. Some of the puns and jokes are good and there are quite a lot of amusing touches. The artwork while not in the Tenniel style complements the story nicely and I suspect that there are many references and subtleties that a single reading has failed to reveal to me. The main problem is that at times it tries rather too hard to be clever. References to Descartes and an exposition of Zeno's paradox are deftly handled but seem a little out of place. The insistence on explaining some of them in those annoying Gardneresque footnotes doesn't help. As soon as you need to explain a joke it ceases to be funny.
The story has Alice journeying to the moon through the eyepiece of a telescope and while there having the kind of adventures that she had in Wonderland and through the looking glass. The style doesn't quite hit the mark but comes much closer than Jeff Noon's Automated Alice* (though not as close as Gilbert Adair's Alice Through The Needle's Eye *). This is "explained" by suggesting that the work was written some years after the original stories, again an explanation that is necessary only because the author insists on maintaining the fiction that this is a lost story.
What of the poems and songs? Once again they are in the correct style and character and with a nice whimsy but they lack the surety of Dodgson's metre and caused me to stumble in trying to get the rhythms right.
Final verdict? A slight but diverting dreamlike tale which would have been all the better if more attention had been given to crafting a longer story and less to the learned and mock-erudite footnotes.