by Steve Martin

Created on: January 20, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

Alice Through the Looking-Glass, by Lewis Carroll, follows on from its predecessor
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Instead of reaching the magical world by falling down a rabbit hole, however, this time our heroine steps through a mirror in order to enter the author's strange reality, where everything we know and think is overturned.

The story follows Alice as she tries to cross a chessboard world in order to reach the other side and so become a queen. On the way, she meets such wonderful characters as the twins, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty and the Red Knight and White Knight.

As in the first book, the joy of reading the story comes not from the plot or characterisation, but in being totally overpowered by Lewis Carroll's imaginative genius and being swept into a world as different from ours as it is possible to be. This is a world where people can remember what is going to happen; where lions and unicorns fight for hours before sitting down to tea together, where anything can and does happen because such prosaic constructs as time, logic and cause and effect so essential on our world have no place.

Lewis Carroll is a truly wonderful writer. What comes across most powerfully when reading this book is that the author loves words; loves playing with them; loves seeing what they can do. This can be best seen, perhaps, in the poems which litter the book; poems such as The Walrus and the Carpenter and Jabberwocky. I would definitely recommend this as a book to read. However good any TV adaptation may be, nothing beats the experience of coming face-to-face with the writing of Lewis Carroll.

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