Alice in Sunderland

By Kate Laity

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I have such an eclectic bag of tastes that it’s exceedingly rare to find a book that satisfies so many of them, but Talbot’s ALICE is one of those singular books. Of course, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t love something in the book. It’s a heady mix of comics narrative, Alice in Wonderland as well as through her looking glass and historical characters as widespread as the Venerable Bede, George Formby and Gertrude Bell.

Yes, the Venerable Bede—seventh-century monk of Wearmouth-Jarrow.

You have to understand—medievalists are the Rodney Dangerfield of academics. To say we don’t get no respect is putting it mildly. As old medievalists die, we’re seldom replaced. Even our colleagues disparage our work, in part because it’s old stuff, but often because it’s also damned intimidating. Ask an academic how many languages she has to know, and she might grudgingly admit to needing a couple of modern languages for research. Me, I had to know Latin, Old English, Middle English, Old Irish, Gothic, Old High German, Middle High German, modern German, Old Norse and modern Swedish. Granted, I didn’t really have to study Gothic, but if you’re doing Old High German, why not pick up the matched set? And let’s not even start with the difficulties of reading vellum manuscripts in a cramped insular hand.

Medievalists do tend to drone on too long, too.

So, how wonderful is it to have a book that not only suffuses its narrative with my favorite book of all time, Carroll’s mind-bending bible of nonsense, but also features the seventh century monk who invented English history in his HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM (and I do mean invent). I can forgive Talbot using the wince-worthy term “dark ages” because so much of this journey is glorious. A journey it is: the link for the story is a pilgrimage through his adopted home of Sunderland in the northeast of England.

While that may make it sounds a tad lugubrious, nil desperandum! As the subtitle clearly indicates, this is “an entertainment.” Talbot literally starts us off on stage, the end papers serving as the safety curtain. A turn of the page brings us to the playbill for the night’s performance at the Empire Sunderland (the very real theatre at the heart of so much entertainment history). For one night only, it the “portmanteau comic” Alice in Sunderland performed by Talbot, “The Wigan Titwillow” who takes up the part of the Plebian (sole audience member), the Performer and the Pilgrim. This tripartite role allows him to shift between narrative voices with a visual cue, which smoothes many (though not all) of the otherwise abrupt transitions between the diverse strands of the tale.

All the seriousness of study and tone which might undercut the sense of fun gets the heave ho at the start with Talbot’s deliberately joke set-up, “Well, there’s this guy, right…and he goes to this theatre…” as the sketch becomes finished inks and the Plebian approaches his home for the evening, the Empire Theatre. While one might question the leather jacket-clad guy’s choice of entertainment, we’re quickly cued that he has stepped into uncertainty as he runs into Carroll’s white rabbit and knitting sheep, then gingerly takes his seat in the empty theater. The Performer appears in rabbit-face spotlighted on the stage and opens with the Chorus’ lines from Henry V. Just as Shakespeare used his words to turn the bare Elizabethan stage into the rough fields of Agincourt, Talbot uses the malleability of comics to shift between his three personas, as well as between history and literature, between Carroll’s stories and his life, between the past and the present—in color, black and white and in every possible style that suits the moment.

The story of local hero Jack Crawford appears to be in the yellowed pages of a Boy’s Own Adventure, while the local ghost story looks like it was torn from the pages of an old E.C. comic. Prince Harry’s rallying speech, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends,” Talbot renders in a goofy Mad Magazine style, while he developed his own approximation of an Arts and Crafts style comic for his retelling of the famed Lambton Worm’s legend (one feels William Morris would approve). This nimble movement between styles and registers works well, often glossing over more jarring discordances within the narrative. How can you not love a story that juxtaposes Jeff Smith and Bram Stoker, or Groucho Mark and Miles Standish? We learn more about the 19th century serial killer—wait for it—Mary Ann Cotton (you thought I was going to mention the Ripper, right?) as well as the rise and fall and rise again of the Sunderland region, decimated by Thatcher (who wasn’t) but restored by imagination and dedication. While there’s a touch of melancholy in Talbot’s musings on the passage of time along the journey, there’s also a running theme of the power of creativity and the renewable resource of storytelling. The well is deep.

It’s a fitting place to find the lives of Carroll and his muse Alice intertwining long before legendary encounter in the Oxford garden. In fact, their histories intersect generations before in the Sunderland region, as Talbot shows tracing the disparate threads of history from the Romans to the Celts to the Angles and Saxons, on to the Viking years and eventually the Norman conquest (when the Talbots come over). But Alice and Dodgson remain the touchstones—“Jabberwocky” is written here, as is “Sylvie and Bruno,” and Talbot makes a convincing case for many of the other likely inspirations in the region where they both spent so much of their time. It’s clear: Oxford no longer owns Alice, and Bryan Talbot has given birth to a suitable heir who looks back to his forebears but leaps forward confidently into the unknown ever curiouser and curiouser.

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