New York Review of Books Review

IMAGINE FINDING YOURSELF in a place where delusion is enforced by custom and law, no one really understands what anyone else is saying, facts are suspect, lies relished, heads roll for arbitrary and fanciful reasons, and only children are perceptive enough to observe that nothing makes sense. Where might you be? Wonderland? A Ted Cruz rally? In "After Alice," Gregory Maguire suggests Lewis Carroll's Oxford might well match that description. During the reign of Victoria, this ancient college town of peculiar men and unexamined double standards was every bit as confounding as the world little Alice discovered at the bottom of the rabbit hole. The one is contrasted against the other in a narrative that purrs with all the warm confidence of a Cheshire cat. Ada Boyce is puffy, bent-backed and unlovely, confined to an agonizing iron corset meant to correct her unladylike posture. Mother drinks, father sermonizes, baby shrieks and the governess entertains daydreams of drowning her charge. Ada's closest (and only) companion is dreamy Alice Clowd, who lives at the Croft, a short walk along the River Cherwell from Ada's home. On a dazzling midsummer morning in 1860-something, Ada slips away from her adult guardians to hunt down her best friend, plants a foot wrong and goes for a long tumble into literature's most famous fantasia, the nonsense world Carroll introduced in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." At first, hardly anyone notes the disappearance of two children (it was an era when parents worried less about the sort of creepy fellows who fixate on little girls - creepy fellows like Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, who history suggests might not have been an ideal babysitter). Ada's family has no great use for her. Alice's big sister, Lydia, is glad not to have a couple of brats underfoot. And Alice's father has only just emerged from mourning his prematurely deceased wife to play host to a visiting celebrity, Charles Darwin. Mr. Darwin has brought a fetching young American abolitionist along with him, Mr. Winter, who is himself accompanied by a child escaped from slavery: quiet, serious Siam. Winter may be handsome, idealistic and eligible, but he's also too old for Lydia Clowd, who is just 15. That doesn't stop Lydia from luring him on a long walk that will give her a chance to experiment with grown-up flirtation (in this novel, everyone is a victim of impossible daydreams). But romantic preoccupations give way to growing alarm, after little Siam goes missing as well, falling through the looking glass while no one is paying attention. Suddenly the somnolent summer afternoon has devoured three children whole, and only Lydia and Ada's governess have any sense that all is not entirely right. Maguire effortlessly leaps between the absurd illusions of Wonderland and the building suspense of the search for the children in antique Oxford. Down below, Ada and Siam grapple with the maddening nonsense of the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter. Up above, Lydia finds herself no less befuddled by her own mysterious longings and the motives of the adults around her. She's also haunted by a darker and more serious disappearance than the absence of a few wandering children: the heart-sickening loss of her mother. Her faith is of no use to her. Darwin's theories of evolution have made the comforts of religion look as silly as a story out of Mother Goose. Nor can Lydia turn to that seat of 19th-century authority, her father, for wisdom. Mr. Clowd has long since vanished down the rabbit hole of his own grief and confusion. The territory of mourning is unmapped country; so too is the geography of courtship, desire and cultural expectation. "Lydia will spend her entire life in a nexus of Victorian social understandings too near to be identified by the naked eye, like viruses, or radiation," Maguire notes, in typically elegant fashion. "After Alice" offers an almost embarrassing harvest of delightfully stated observations like that one. Lydia may be stranded in an adult world of unreasonable and ridiculous obligations, but in Wonderland, Ada has slipped free of both her insufferable corset and the equally iron-shod confines of her time, place and status. Siam finds the neighborhood even more to his liking. As a slave, Siam was once offered his freedom, if he could scoop up a hundred pennies that had been baked white-hot in a campfire. His palms are still horribly marked by the burns. But his blackness and his scars don't bother anyone in Wonderland, a place beyond the reach of history's brutality. "There is no back story in dream. Time slips all its handcuffs." For an orphaned black kid in the era of the Civil War, that place on the other side of the looking glass looks a lot like real freedom. AS ADA AND SIAM draw nearer to Alice, the continually off-screen object of their quest, and as time runs out to find the vanished children in the world above, Maguire closes in on some big, haunting ideas himself, about the loss of loved ones and religious faith, about cultural and romantic subjugations, and about the evolutionary value of imagination. Heady stuff. Maguire confronts his weighty themes with a light touch and exquisite, lovely language. A sample page offers us such word candy as "bosh" and "gallootress," and when stout Ada spies her own reflection, she feels she is staring upon "a rotten packet of fairy." Maguire's playful vocabulary may be Carroll-esque, but his keen wit is closer to Monty Python: "'I may be drowning,' she called. "'Please don't,' came a reply." The author's mastery of his material occasionally falters, in small ways. He renders the social and historical tensions of long-ago Oxford so well, in such compelling fashion, that Wonderland itself occasionally loses its luster. And each reader will have a different tolerance for characters who speak in riddles. For myself, I'll take a monstrous Jabberwocky over circular and meaningless jibber-jabber any day. Still, it seems wrong to quibble when presented with such a tasty froth of incident and such a fine, unforced sense of play. Gregory Maguire has made a cottage industry out of reframing famous children's stories to explore neglected side characters and misrepresented villains. He has tracked through all of the precincts of Oz and a lot of the landscape of Grimm's fairy tales, and one would not be surprised if his heart was no longer in such expeditions. Furthermore, Alice's Wonderland has been so often revisited - in novels, films, games and comics - that it would seem everything worth discovering there must have been strip-mined long ago. Even that phrase, "down the rabbit hole," is so overused that it now has all the life of a taxidermied white hare. But Maguire's enthusiasm is intact, his erudition a joy, and his sense of fun infectious. What could have been a tired exercise in the familiar instead recharges a beloved bit of nonsense. By book's end, most readers will be hoping for a sequel (Maguire leaves the door open to one). As we say in Maine, my old home state: wicked. Maguire explores cultural and romantic subjugation, and the value of imagination. JOE HILL is the author of a story collection, "20 th Century Ghosts,'' and three novels, most recently "NOS4A2