Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies April 22, 2009

To begin, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is wonderfully clever.  Seth Grahame-Smith takes an idea that would be a great 5-minute SNL skit and manages to have it carry a 300+ page book.  He weaves the Zombies into the existing work organically, placing the action where it heightens rather than impedes the plot.  Grahame-Smith works in a complete world, the zombies don’t just appear every dozen pages and wreak havoc, they are very much on the characters’ minds.  In fact, I found that I had no problems with the additions to Austen’s text in the form of Zombies, Ninjas, and Martial Arts; they work, and that is a compliment to Grahame-Smith’s very inventive mind.  Beyond simply functioning, the Zombie/Ninja stuff is hysterical.

“To walk three miles, or whatever it is, above her ankles in dirt, and alone, quite alone! With the unmentionable menace dragging poor souls off the road and to their doom day and night? What could she mean by it? It seems to me to show an abominable sort of conceited independence, a most country-town indifference to decorum….I am afraid, Mr. Darcy,” observed Miss Bingley in a half whisper, “that this adventure has rather affected your admiration of her fine eyes.”

“Not at all,” he replied; “they were brightened by the exercise.”

This was the first passage that made me actually laugh out loud, and considering that instead of a walk through the countryside Elizabeth’s exercise was a desperate fight against three Zombies, it actually improves on the original.  Grahame-Smith manages to give many of the iconic moments in Pride and Prejudice his own twist, and I never disliked those changes.

If all Seth Grahame-Smith had done to Pride and Prejudice was add Zombies, even preserving the passages he edited to better fit the undead, this would be an unequivocally enthusiastic review.  However, he falls down in two major areas that give me pause in recommending it, especially to other Austen fans.  First, he could have used a better editor, in terms of consistency, the abridgment, and the text making sense.  Second, he adds passages that push things to the point of caricature, demolishing depth and historical accuracy along the way.  I’m saving most of my full blown ire on this subject for a separate post, for people who think they can handle me in full on I-once-aspired-to-be-the-world’s-foremost-authority-on-Jane-Austen mode.

Grahame-Smith really needs a better editor.  His spelling of Bennet, the surname of 7 main characters, fluctuates throughout the novel.  This something a word processor can fix; there’s simply no excuse for it.  He also, consistantly refers to the militia quartered at Meryton as the “shire Milita.”  In Austen’s text they are the “—-shire Militia”, a proper noun with the full name of the county ommitted.  By deleting the “—-” Grahame-Smith indicates that they are either the militia for the county, the archaic (even in the 19th century) term would be shire, or that he doesn’t understand what he’s doing by either improperly capatalizing a proper noun or ignoring the reasons for the “—-” altogether.  A better editor would have, hopefully, improved Grahame-Smith’s abysmal abridgment as well.  He cuts scenes so that, from my (Comprehensive Pride and Prejudice Awareness of 50.25) perspective, they cease to make sense.  Deleting lines for no reason other than to make scenes shorter, on at least a few occasions sacrificing Austen’s subtle humor for space to fit in his own.  Furthermore, there are actual logical errors in his alterations, places where he has characters talk about other characters pages before discovering their identities.  I’m not talking a “we haven’t been introduced” thing, this is a “whoah! I never would have guessed that these people are actually —” thing.  Suffice it to say that his abridgments bothered me, both as an Austenite and because some of them made no sense.  Simply put, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies gives Twilight a run for it’s money when it comes to bad editing. (grammatical errors intended)

Jane Austen write light satire; her characters have flaws that critique certain elements of Regency life, but her commentary isn’t blatant, at least not until Seth Grahame-Smith gets his hands on it.  I understand that Grahame-Smith’s work is satirizing Austen, I do, but I really dislike how he goes about it.  He pushes several of the characters, including Darcy to the point where they lose their depth and become caricature.  It’s painful for me to watch these characters that I know so well get regulated to two dimensions and it’s untrue to the spirit of the book.  I could maybe handle some of the satire if it wasn’t so entirely modern in character.  I’m weird and I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies in lieu of a book I’m still reading: What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist-The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England, a history book dedicated to bettering the 21st century reader’s understanding of 19th century literature, and I’m not learning a whole lot of new information from it either.  I know my shit when it comes to Austen, so when people like Darcy spout things like

“Miss Bingley, the groans of a hundred unmentionables would be more pleasing to my ears then one more word from your mouth…”

it actually causes me pain. 1) Darcy is, according to Austen, polite to those select few he deems his peers, which definitely includes Miss Bingley. 2) At this time period, even given certain changes for an infestation of zombies, class is still important enough to prevent Darcy and Bingley from marrying the Bennet sister of their choice so it would be unthinkable for Darcy to be so rude to his friend, peer, and hostess.  The caricaturization and historical inaccuracy persist throughout the book and while they are nitpicky details, they contribute to ruin the otherwise enjoyable experience.

In the end, do I recommend Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?  To anyone from the Austen-hater to the casual Austen fan, yes.  It is a clever, funny, entertaining take on the classic novel.  However, if you really love Pride and Prejudice, if you’ve watched the BBC/A&E Miniseries multiple times, if you’ve read all of Austen’s other novels, then you might want to take a pass on this one, maybe take it out from the library.  I’m not saying that no Pride and Prejudice fan could enjoy Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I enjoyed it quite a bit, actually.  I’m just cautioning people before they invest time and money into something they might not enjoy.

Witness December 18, 2008

So I’m laying here trying to sleep and I’m listening to James McPherson’s “This Mighty Scourge,” which is about the American Civil War. I think “Man, I wonder what it was like to hear Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address” (which is weird, because the part I’m listening to is about Ulysses S. Grant, not Lincoln or Gettysburg).

I got to thinking about how amazing it would be to witness something like the Gettysburg Address, about how modern technology allows us to see things like Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech and about everything that we can’t see because it happened too long ago or that you can tell from the recording was just magical in person. The list I came up with seemed so good that I wanted to share it, no explanations, just the list.

Historic Events I Would Go See (if I could time travel)

1) Gettysburg Address
2) Dickens’ last public reading
3) The murder of Julius Caesar
4) The Beatles last concert
5) (in order of believability) The battle between Achilles and Hector/The Sack of Troy/Homer reciting The Illiad
6) Cy Young/Don Larsen/Sandy Koufax’s Perfect Game
7) Ella Fitzgerald in Concert, February 13, 1960 Berlin
8 ) The Moon Landing

I’m writing this on my iPod so please pardon any spelling errors, I’m gonna go fix this in the morning, but the spirit is with me now.
ETA: Alright, spelling and what not is fixed.

I’ve got my spies on you! May 27, 2008

So picking up about my life (from yesterday) I was going to say what I thought would be the most ideal thing in the world, but the truth is that I really don’t know anymore.  I guess it slipped my mind, but my life is kind of unsettled like that right now.

I do feel pretty accomplished, though, because my Twitter bot for the Daily Chum has been a huge success, and the flickr group I also started for the chum is looking like it might take off.  So that’s all well and good, but it will be pretty sad when the bot has more followers than I do, which it’s looking like it will happen pretty soon.  Also! I’ve been twittering haikus I wrote for Wendy’s Haiku contest over the past couple of days and I want people to vote on them here tomorrow, so be sure that you come back then!

On to the business of the day, my first book of the summer!  The book was Spies: The Secret Agents Who Changed the Course of History by Ernest Volkman; I really enjoyed it.  It was kinda panned in both the professional and amateur reviews on Amazon, but I suppose I’m just burnt out and easy to please because it was really fun to read.  The book is made up of very short concise biographies of significant figures in 20th Century espionage and they’re grouped according to what kind of agent they were.  In my experience (and I have some, I tried to create a fantasy-medieval era intelligence ring for a story) it is really hard to get any concise details on anything espionage-related (for good reason I think) but I feel like this book is a good way to become a bit more familiar with the language and terminology.  I generally prefer biography to straight up history because it tends to be more linear and I care more about it because there is a story.  I think this book is good for people with a general interest but no previous knowledge, it’s a little like reading the wikipedia entries on all of these guys, but I have derived hours of entertainment from reading wikipedia entries so I’m ok with that.  Also, because I bought the book at half price books, I think it’s a good way to do a little reading and discover what else I would like to read about in this field, I know now that I should look for stuff more specifically about historical espionage (there’s stuff on American Civil and Revolutionary War espionage) and if I were more interested in anyone in the book, I would then be able to track down longer biographies of them.  As it is I wouldn’t go seeking anything, but if I run across a biography of H.A.R. Philby or someone else at the library or HPB I would probably pick it up.

Summer… at last? May 26, 2008

School’s over, finally.  Second semester really kicked my butt this year, everything was pretty brutal but Creative Writing was the worst because I did so much writing for it that it took away all my drive to write elsewhere (like here or the chum) and no matter how badly I wanted to write my chum column or a blog post I just didn’t have it in me.  It was also pretty defeatist because I really am not meant to write fiction that literature snobs will like.  I’ll stick to popular fiction, where my desire to blow things up is seen as indulging my audience’s desire for excitement rather than a precursor to a murderous rampage across campus (imaginary violence is the next tobacco, mark my words).  On the bright side, my other classes were pretty good, my business law class actually has me re-thinking the path of my entire life (I did unexpectedly well).  Between doing well in law, hating creative, and my failure to actually do anything for the Chum being a lawyer seems easy, and more up my alley than publishing.

Speaking of the Chum, man, ch-ch-ch-changes going on over there.  I’m the new Online/Technical editor, which is nice, but I’ve always been wary of being labeled the tech-head and it’s not great for that.  I am the most webbish of the lot of us, so it makes sense, but I’d hate to get pigeonholed into something that isn’t really my strong suit.  Of course, I did build a pretty wicked sweet twitter bot today, entirely from the ground up, so I’m not too bad at the job, it’s just not the most ideal thing in the whole wide world.

I would say “speaking of the most ideal thing in the whole wide world” here, but I think it’s time to cut to the chase.  As you might know from the title of this blog and everything, I kinda like reading, and as it is summer the really god thing is that I have a lot of time to read, nothing else that I have to read (a problem during school) and I usually end up with a pretty good stock of books to read in summer.  So anyway, in order to try and make myself write on this blog/read more in general this summer I’m gonna gush about every book I read here on the blog. Not review outright, because I don’t want it to be a review thing, but more chronicle my feelings about what I’m reading.  I’m going to try and avoid rereading anything I read this summer (which means I read what I want, including stuff I’ve already read, but not gush about anything twice, except for one exception I’ll get to when/if it happens), and I am not going to gush over single issues of the comics that I read, but I will count trades and/or reading whole arcs together (like 5+ issues) but I will try and at least list the comics I buy each week.   Along with knitting and talking comics I think I should be able to have enough gushing to do to update 5 days a week or so, I’ve got a 4 book backlog to get through already and there are so many books that I want to read that content shouldn’t be a problem (and if it is I’ll do a series on every podcast that I listen to). The fun starts tomorrow, see ya then!