Would You Like Brains With Your Tea and Crumpet?

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Austen lovers, beware! If you are of the frighteningly humorless variety of your species who thinks that your goddess is sacrosanct, detest Matthew MaFayden for even attempting to try on Mr. Darcy's...er...I mean Colin Firth's...role, and have a shrine to the aforementioned Darcy (or Messrs. Knightley, Wentworth, Ferras or Brandon) in your closet then this book is not for you. However if you can appreciate a bit of fun and satire, as Austen herself certainly could, you'll enjoy this surreal remake of a classic.

Seth Grahame-Smith has basically left the bulk of the plot revolving around the Bennet family intact with one minor deviation: legions of the undead wreaking havoc on Hertfordshire. The Bennet sisters have been trained by their father and in the Orient in combat and are some of the fiercest slayers in England. Thankfully Grahame-Smith left the social commentary and comedy of manners left in so although it is the primary objective of Mr. Bennet to keep his daughters alive, it is still very much the primary objective of their mother to get them married.

The real humor of the story is the long passages, taken verbatim from Austen's original, seasoned with random zombie attacks and oriental fighting. The opening lines for example, "It is a fact universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains." This list goes on! The early ball at Netherfield takes place with little change, except for the undead who seize and feast on those guests who unfortunately happened to be standing near the windows before being dispatched by the Bennets. When Darcy proposes to Elizabeth she returns not only an impassioned refusal, but a roundhouse kick to the face for destroying (as she believes) the happiness of her sister Jane. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is accompanied everywhere by her ninja bodyguards and gets into a duel with Elizabeth to keep her away from her nephew Darcy. And while those ardent Austen fans may be foaming at the mouth with rage to read this list of blasphemies, I think even they would join me in a hearty sense of satisfaction to hear that Darcy breaks the legs of the infamous Wickham for his rakish behavior.

Zombies may seem a bit much but the plot of Pride and Prejudice has already been done, redone, spawned series about the Darcy's future children, delved far deeper than necessary into their sex life, and redone again so in some ways it's refreshing to read a book that's an entire pun on the plot to begin with. If you read this book expecting great literature like the original, you will be disappointed (or incandescent with rage if your of that particular variety...) but if you take it as what it is, a riotous romp of whimsy, you'll spend the entire book laughing. Definitely a quick read to...er...sink your teeth into.

Letters

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

Have you ever read something and thought to yourself, “Wow, I really relate to that!” Well, if you have, then you know what ever paragraph of The Screwtape Letters was like for me. I don’t know how I got to adulthood without reading it, but somehow I managed to get here. It’s been on my list, but I’ll admit, I judged a book by its cover. Er, title. The Screwtape Letters isn’t the most inviting title, and the thought of reading a devil’s thoughts was largely unappealing. And now I’m slapping myself for not having read this sooner. Bad Echo!

Basically, The Screwtape Letters is a collection of letters from Screwtape, a senior devil in Satan’s kingdom, to his nephew, Wormwood, a newly-trained devil, who is working on his first “patient.” As I read each letter and saw the advise that Screwtape provides for Wormwood, along with accompanying explanation of why that particular tactic works, I was aghast at how many of the vices they were discussing I deal with. Now, I like to think I’m a pretty good person. I go to church, I try to be charitable, I try to be patient and serve others, but man, Screwtape illuminates why someone who does these things (just like me) can really be quite the ideal patient for someone like Wormwood, because it’s so easy to make us think we’re still being so dang good.

This book goes through family relations, work, feelings for coworkers, friends, war and peace, love and sex, and many of the other things that we as humans deal with on a daily basis, but that can be twisted from a good thing into a soul-damning thing if approached in just the right way. As I read on, I felt such empathy for the patient and sincerely hoped he would make it out the other end on top. He does, which gave me hope that we can all make it if we pay attention and do what we know is right rather than what seems almost right. It was hard for the patient, as it is for us, but he made it.

It may sound campy or clichéd, but trust me, this book will show you things that are so obvious but that you’ve never seen. It is a book that needs to be sipped rather than gulped, but it’s so worth reading. I wholeheartedly recommend The Screwtape Letters, with my only regret being that I didn’t read it sooner!

Cold Comfort

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

I love satire. I work at a junior high. I love funny. Cold Comfort Farm is touted as one of the funniest novels ever written. Well, if so, it sure didn’t hit my funny bone. Now, before those of you who read and now adore the book, let me qualify myself: there were some funny parts. I did laugh out loud once or twice. But all in all, it just didn’t quite hit my specific sense of humor. Maybe it’s because I read pages 1-50 at the most awful, painful graduation ceremony I’ve been to in years. Maybe it’s because my sense of humor isn’t as refined as it needs to be. Whatever the case, I’d give it a lukewarm review, but it’s not on my list of favorites.

On with the lukewarm review.

Stella Gibbons tale revolves around Flora Poste, a recently orphaned young woman who, rather than actually get a job, decides to live with some distant family members and meddle in their lives. She writes several family members, and decides that she will live with the family she knows the least about: the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm.

Flora shows up to meet her new housemates and is amazed at what she finds: Cousin Judith is depressed and obsessed with her son, Seth loves the ladies (especially the farm maid, who has had a child each year after she and Seth have their little forays), Reuben covets the farm but knows he will never receive it, Amos preaches doom and destruction by deity, Elfine is beautiful but is too artsy and doesn’t have a clue how to attract a man, and Aunt Ada saw something nasty in the woodshed some 50 or so years ago and is bedridden because of it.

Flora decides she has come here in order to “fix” these Starkadders. First, she starts with Elfine. She teachers her how to walk, how to sit and eat, what to talk about, changes her wardrobe and her hair, and gets her engaged to one of the richest men in town. Then she moves on to the rest of the family. She “borrows” her cousin’s friend, the moviemaker, who sweeps Seth off to Hollywood (since he’s so dashing and farmy and all). She flames Amos’s religious fire, telling him how unfair it is to the world that he isn’t preaching all over everywhere. With Amos out of the way, Reuben has full reign of the farm, and is able to do what he will with it. Judith is sent off on a journey around Europe touring old churches so she can obsess about herself. And Aunt Ada finally makes it out of bed, with Flora’s help, and decides to live the high life in Paris. All is well, Flora moves out, and gallivants off to fall in love with her second cousin, who happens to also be a marvelous dancer.

Well, of course, there are twists and turns along the way, which are for the most part, amusing. What bothered me was that it read like a math problem. Problem – Flora doesn’t want to work and would rather meddle. Solution – Sarkadders! Problem – Judith is depressed and obsessed. Solution – churches in Europe. And on and on. There seemed to be no hindrance to the problems, and though the narration was solid, not much of the dialogue was particularly witty. I will fully admit that, having not much of a clue about life in England, I may be missing a lot of the humor in what I read. However, I am of the belief that a truly funny book can be funny no matter where the book is read. The problem could also be that I spent my major reading postmodern African American literature, none of which has a shining ending or a funny plot. So if you're into 1930s British Literature, you'll probably appreciate this much more than I did. Regardless, I did enjoy Cold Comfort Farm and am moderately glad I read it. Now just wait till Calliope reads this entry and decides she needs to set me strait in her own review of the farm…

It IS Wrong...

Eating People is Wrong
by Malcom Bradbury

For such a fantastic title and such a great topic as British university life, this book is often a bit of a letdown. Then again I'm hesitant to completely condemn it because it is also often side splittingly funny. To be honest, most of this book will go straight over the heads of those who read it because the majority of the dialog is professors and intellectuals talking about the fundamental problems of being professors and intellectuals in a post-intellectual world...but the rest of the book is those same people, normalized and brought back down to a human level, stumbling through life just about as well (or badly) as the rest of us. I also think many readers are going to be frustrated and perplexed by the lack of action, but if you decide to plug your way through it, just keep in mind that this is not an action book with action characters; it's a book about lonely, sad, over-brilliant, under-socialized university dwellers, ludicrous in their inflated sense of self-importance and crippled by the narrowness of their world. If as the reader I felt a little confined within the story, think how must the characters feel!

This is Bradbury's first novel and it has the jolty feel that most first novels do, but you find yourself intrigued by the slow plots in spite of yourself. There's Professor Stuart Treece, the main character: perplexed by his role as an intellectual in post-war Britain, unable to pass the test to get a bike license, and plagued by his "genius" (i.e. woefully unhelpable menace) graduate student Louis Bates. Bates wanders through the world trying to educate others (mostly by calling everyone other than himself and imbecile), get his poetry published (which no one wants to read until its published and they realize it's good), and falling in love (stalking) his fellow student Emma Fielding. Miss Fielding is unfortunately also the object of lust for an African exchange student, who offers to divorce his other three wives for her and give her his best goat in exchange for her hand, as well as Treece himself with whom she has a brief...well, it can't truly be called a love affair...an intellectual affair involving sex, perhaps?

"It seemed as if his special human situation had somehow sapped him...Outside his own environment Treece's vital force emerged as a small thing that was weak in front of the most eternal human test, whether he was to endure or to die; there is a further edge to alienation beyond which one cases to have a real place in the world, and Treece had found himself more and more pushed toward the fringes of the society he lived in, into a peripheral and invalid existence. What was the poor little humanist to do? The world was fragmented and no Utopia was in sight..."

That passage from the end of the novel sums up Treece's, and indeed many intellectuals' predicament in the mid-twentieth century: they are thinking folk lost in a world that values action, they have no place in society at large, they do nothing and accomplish nothing that the world recognizes a valuable. Treece and Bates both end up in the hospital, the first from a hemorrhage, the second from pneumonia when he tried to impress Emma and nearly drowned in a river. In a final desperate bid to rid herself of Bates, Emma tells him cruelly of the affair she had with Treece and that Bates is an artist and therefore a scapegoat of everything wrong with society, so he should stop fighting his fate and embrace his outcast status. Bates tries to commit suicide, for which he is moved to a mental hospital and set to stand trial.

The sense of non-change carries through to the final words, "She went away, and he lay there in his bed, and felt as though this would be his condition for evermore, and that from this he would never, ever escape."

If you're looking for classic British dark humor, by all means jump into this book. Just make sure you know what you're getting into.