In the daily discomfort of my car, one hour going to work and another coming home, I was a captive audience. Nevertheless, I gave this book a second chance when an audiobook edition of it practically fell into my hands. But borrowing the fruit of another author’s imagination, only to attack him personally along with the rightness of what he wrote, is beyond bad manners.
Even a thinly veiled disguise might have sufficed. The idea could have been (and, I later decided after finally finishing the book, really was) most compelling in its way but by changing it to a fictional author’s fantasy classic, Beddor could have avoided cutting the throat of a sacred cow right on Page One. I doubt I would have taken umbrage at this idea had the wonderland in question been any other than the Wonderland. And frankly, I was offended by Beddor’s central conceit that Wonderland, as we know and love it, was a deliberate and cynical distortion of something wilder and better. It is, after all, his (Dodgson’s) creation, and we owe him so much for it.
Where I think Frank Beddor crossed the line was in casting Dodgson as a dissembling fool, if not indeed a creep, who betrayed Alice’s confidences, bowdlerized her true reminiscences, and got Wonderland all wrong. I expect some degree of originality, even to the extent of totally reimagining the concept. I’m not even upset by the fact that the author put a fresh twist on Carroll’s Wonderland. I’m all for “further tales” of already-established, richly imagined fantasy worlds. Lewis Carroll) in his classic Alice in Wonderland.
What turned me off wasn’t the fact that it built on the fantasy world created by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. The first time I started to read this book, I didn’t get past the prologue.
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