Last night I led a discussion at my book group about Alice in Wonderland. I vaguely remember reading it as a child, and after several years of picking bad books to lead, I’ve decided to stick with classic kids lit. At least it will 1) be short and 2) not be racy. (Yes, one year I picked a Kingsolver book that involved a lot of fecundity that really wasn’t what I was hoping to discuss with lots of friends from church.)
I actually did not enjoy the book. I kept wanting to find the point, the plot, the action, the logic. And that’s the problem, the book has no plot. It’s entirely character driven, which is a bit hard for this Type-A person to appreciate. The characters are crazy, and fascinating, but there’s also this somnolent air of boredom.
It is definitely the best book I’ve ever read in recreating what a dream feels like, with the crazy nonsensical scenes coming one after the other with only vague connection. There are other fantastical dream-like children’s books (Peter Pan, Wizard of Oz) but both are still more more plot driven. The feeling of the book, the disconnected-bored-slightly crazy-disjointed dream-like state actually reminds me of the feeling I got from reading Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
But, the beauty of book group was that I left having an appreciation for the book. I went in wondering how in the world this could have been the most popular children’s book in England for years and years and remain popular worldwide even today, and I emerged with the answer: the book approximates how a child thinks. A child experiences the world as a succession of scenes, with little framework to connect them all, little understanding of why X is happening or past/future. Instead the child is essentially in an eternal present, enjoying each experience as it comes along without connection to anything else.
I also realized that the Alice stories also are somewhat similar to stories I make up with Tucker. We like to play a game with his sticker book, where he picks a scene and I start to tell a story about the scene. One by one he puts down random stickers and I have to include them all in the story. This delights Tucker to no end, and it IS possible to connect almost any disparate random sticker but it does produce a certain Alice-like quality.
