Alice in…Sunderland

The book is like a giant game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Charles Dodgson, better known by his penname Lewis Carroll, spent some time in Sunderland. That is the primary connection which gives the book its name and which, truth be told, allowed the book to have a title which kept it from being so incredibly obscure that nobody would have ever read it.

The book itself is a meandering journey through history. It relates the history of Sunderland and everything even remotely connected to Sunderland and everything even remotely connected to anything even remotely connected to Sunderland and everything…well, you get the point. Since Lewis Carroll was in Sunderland, Talbot then has an excuse to relate everything related to the author and everything related to the book and everything related to the real Alice and everything related to Alice’s family, the Lidells, and then the entire history of the Lidells, which is apparently a rather large and ancient family.

After a little over 300 pages, it is reasonable to ask if there is anything that is not less than six degrees departed from Sunderland. This is not, to put to mildly, a tightly constructed book. It is more akin to a wandering conversation with a person whose attention span lasts on average a quarter of a page and at most four pages. Not surprisingly, the quality of the narrative is all over the place, from intensely interesting to trivia that only someone entering high stakes trivia contests would find worth knowing.

What saves the book from being a chore to read is the art. This is a comic book. The art is extraordinary. There is a larger variety of style than in any other single book I have ever seen. Maybe the complete Sandman series has this much variety, but that is a massively longer work. The artistic style changes from page to page, and remarkably it works. As the narrative jumps all over the place in the type of thing being discussed, the art just follows along.

The reason to read this book then has absolutely nothing to do with Sunderland. Truth be told, it is hard to tell how interesting Sunderland itself is, because unless you are paying very close attention, it is nearly impossible to tell which historical bits take place in Sunderland and which are just stories connected to something that is connected to Sunderland. By the end, I am not even sure if Alice Lidell was ever in Sunderland; I know Lewis Carroll was there, but if I cared enough to do so, I’d have to Google to see if Alice was ever there or if all the stories about the Lidells are in this book simply because they knew Carroll who spent at least a day in Sunderland. (At one point, one of Talbot’s avatars in the book asks the avatar of a local historian why none of the Carroll biographies mention the time he spent in Sunderland. One might think that implies the connection is weak.)

Besides watching Talbot at work, weaving history and art into some interesting visual treats, is there anything worth pondering in this book? Two things.

First, everything you know about Lewis Carroll is wrong, well unless you have read Talbot or maybe some biography that gets it right. All the popular ideas about Carroll are simply not true. Carroll was not obsessed with little girls, he was quite sociable in the company of adults, the idea that Carroll was a pedophile is totally unsubstantiated and without merit, and the story that Alice in Wonderland was composed in one afternoon when Carroll was on a boating expedition with Alice and her sisters is not true. So, feel free to read the Alice books for what they are—remarkably clever little puzzles and wordplay.

Second, a book like this is a wonderful reminder that everything is connected to everything else. Take the town where you live. Imagine delving into all the quirky history of your town. You’ll discover a wealth of stories. Those stories and the people in those stories are connected to other quirky stories and people who are them connected to get more stories and people. Next thing you know, you’ll find a connection to an entire world out there. All starting from your neighborhood. No man is an island. Similarly, no town is an island.

Why does this interconnectedness matter? It should remind us of the joy of learning things. There is a serendipitous joy when you just start noticing what you are reading and seeing and visiting and watching. Think of the last two books you read, and then find the connection between them. Maybe the connection is obvious, but maybe it isn’t. But, there is most certainly something interesting in the connection between those two books that would not be apparent from either book in isolation. Start noticing those connections and a whole new world will open up.

Your whole life is like that. At one level, it is one thing after another, but at another level, there is a world of wonder, a world of interconnected wonder, all around you just waiting to be noticed.