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Sanity through the looking
glass By the time she had graduated, aged five, to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, understanding was beside the point. “It was the insanity of it all that appealed to me,” she says. “I loved the sheer idiocy of ‘Will you walk a little faster said a whiting to the snail/There’s a porpoise close behind us and he’s treading on my tail.’ I found that insanity so comforting. “I was an only child, so books were my siblings, my only reference on the adult world. As an only child you realise early that adults are dodgy creatures and in the Alice books, which I read endlessly, Lewis Carroll comforts you with the idea that you are the sane one. The ‘grown-ups’ in the books — The Griffin and Humpty Dumpty and the Queens and so on — are all insane while Alice, the child, is entirely reasonable. There was a part of childhood that Lewis Carroll never left and he communicates childen’s feelings so well.” Atkinson, 49, is dismayed by the recent, revisionist view of Carroll as a dodgy character. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1872) were both written for the amusement of Alice Liddell, a little girl with whom Carroll enjoyed a close and exclusive friendship. “There is no doubt that he was obsessed with Alice Liddell,” says Atkinson. “There were hundreds and hundreds of these little friends he collected in a horrendous kind of way and they were all girls — he hated little boys — but none of them ever accused him of impropriety. I suspect there was an innnocence there, based on naiviety. I like to think of Carroll as just an oddball — a completely sexless individual — and there were lots of very odd Victorians around, weren’t there?” Growing up in York, where her parents ran a medical and surgical supplies shop, Atkinson was a solitary and serious child. “I was such an Alice,” she laughs. “I was always strict with my dolls.” In Carroll’s books, she found a kind of blueprint for emotional development. “Alice is very self-disciplined and logical in her approach to problems. I loved that ‘I will work this out for myself’ thing that she goes through as everything around her becomes more and more illogical. But even though she’s the logical one, she has no power, and I love the fact that she is able to assert herself in the end and seize control of her confusing universe. When this very correct Victorian child says ‘Stuff and nonsense! You’re nothing but a pack of cards’ it’s a real assertion of will. “Identity is such a big thing in both Alice books. I think the second one may be more absurd and darker, but in the first book Alice is essentially saying ‘Who am I?’, especially when she’s changing from big to little and back to big again. “Of course children are changing shape all the time, so that is something they can really relate to. When the Griffin asks Alice, ‘what are you, animal, vegetable or mineral?’ it’s partly to do with that Victorian mania for categorising things, but it’s also saying something quite fundamental about identity and childhood, that need to ask the question ‘Who in the world am I? Where do I fit in’.” As a novelist, Atkinson owes much to the early influence of Carroll. “Because I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland so often, and at such an early age, it imprinted itself on me in a way I didn’t really understand at the time. I think it probably formed my idea of what a good book should be.” While Behind the Scenes at
the Museum and Human Croquet (the title borrowed from the “hedgehog
croquet” that Alice is forced to play) have strong veins of Carroll-esque
humour running through them, it is Atkinson’s third novel, Emotionally
Weird (out in paperback next week) which shows the clearest debt to
Carroll with its sensible heroine adrift in a world of eccentrics, a
world where magic is not out of the question. “Alice was probably the first book I ever read that used magic realism,” says Atkinson. “The magic in Alice isn’t the true magic of fairy tales, it’s that sliding in and out of reality, an acceptance of the ridiculous. As a child, I remember thinking ‘Oh! maybe there is another reality’. I never quite got rid of that idea and maybe that’s what I try to recreate in my own writing.” Of all the lessons to be learnt from the master, however, Atkinson takes as her personal watchword the advice of the Red Queen to Alice: “Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for thing, turn your toes out and remember who you are.” “It’s something
I didn’t understand as a child but believe in now,” says Atkinson.
“It worked for Alice and it works for me.” |
