Pride And Prejudice And Zombies – Book Review
- by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
- Quirk Books
In 1813, Jane Austen published Pride And Prejudice, a clever comic novel of romance and manners in Regency England. She died only four years later, never realising she’d spawned one of the grisliest undead creatures ever to haunt the English language.
Wikipedia’s first paragraph on Jane Austen says she was an English novelist whose realism, biting social commentary and masterful use of free indirect speech, burlesque, and irony have earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writers in English literature. Missing is the part about some of the most staggeringly trivial and tedious material ever to blight the lives of literature students down the centuries.
That may seem a little harsh. And truthfully, in comparison with many of her contemporaries, Austen had a light touch and didn’t appear to be suffering from delusions of grandeur. But †and here’s a news flash †that was nearly two centuries ago.
Times have changed. As a modern reader, with an appreciation of vivid, punchy prose, strong themes, and challenging ideas, my interest in Austen’s work is purely historical. I’ve read several of them, yes, because I’m a writer. I work with the English language, and Austen’s novels represent a lasting contribution to the culture. But you know what? They’re dull.
All those times you fell asleep while your girlfriend gushed over Colin Firth in the movie adaptation, and then had to pretend that you missed bits because there was something in your eye? You were right. She was wrong. It sucked. “Pride And Prejudice is a long-dead satire on a desperately artificial social structure that perished decades before almost anybody reading this review was born. You’d think that rewriting the book to incorporate a Zombie plague that fills England with hideous, brain-sucking undead would be a big forking improvement.
You’d be right. But not as a right as you hoped.
Pride And Prejudice And Zombies is essentially parody. Now, parody is a surprisingly sophisticated form. You must mirror the original work effectively enough that everybody recognises what you’re doing. At the same time, you’ve got to make it fresh and funny, so the laughs keep rolling in.
The most common failure occurs when an author stays too close to the original, in the belief that simply reworking it around a silly premise will make it sidesplittingly funny. If that technique worked, then Mel Brooks Men In Tights would be hilarious.
Seth Grahame-Smith has created a sterling reconstruction of Austen’s novel complete with Austen’s prose techniques, her themes and concerns. Thus, we have a novel of five sisters on the lower edge of English gentry, growing up under the care of a witless mother concerned only with their social standing and the desperate need to see all five of them married, and a father whose intelligence and mild eccentricity would seem to imperil their already precarious social position. The major protagonist is Elizabeth Lizzy Bennet, the second daughter and favourite of her father. The action, such as it is, revolves around Lizzy meeting the apparently cold and imperious Mr Darcy, forming a bad impression of him, and then later falling in love with him when he is revealed as a decent, thoughtful sort of chap through his interventions in the fortune of young Lydia Bennet, who has been stupid enough to run off with a bounder called Wickham.
In this much, PAPAZ follows PAP. However, in the original, the bits that aren’t story-line are filled in with ball-going, gossiping, social visitations, and any amount of over-reacting, and if you can withstand that sort of thing for long, I’ve got no idea what you’re doing on this website. PAPAZ contains much the same stuff, except with zombies.
Grahame-Smith is so concerned with mirroring the original material that the impact of his ËœNow With Added Zombies’ version is all but lost. Sure, we’re told Lizzy is a student of Shaolin whose mastery of the deadly arts is so superlative that she can slaughter the egregious Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s ninjas even while wearing a blindfold. Certainly, zombies crop up with heartwarming frequency, munching on the brains of practically every spear-carrier that the novel can spare †but it’s all offered up in Austen’s light, distanced, downright stilted prose style. It is, in effect, a one-joke piece, a work of high concept that could have created an absolutely hilarious short story, and probably should have stopped right there.
It’s tempting to compare this book with Jasper Fforde’s fantastic Tuesday Next novels, which plunge into and out of popular and classic fictions at will, hoisting much-loved fictional characters into a demented version of the real world, making obscure literary jokes at one instant and broad, groanworthy puns the next all while shooting along at a rate of knots with action and mayhem to spare. I was really hoping for something like that: a kind of Pride And Prejudice From Dusk Till Dawn in which Austen’s excruciatingly artificial world of tinkly-winkly social mannerisms is shattered by the unexpected arrival of brain-sucking hordes of stinking, tattered, walking corpses.
Unfortunately, Grahame-Smith didn’t quite rise to the challenge. Whether he was overawed by the reputation of the original and feared to plunder it for all it was worth, or whether he simply loved it too deeply to do other than offer an homage through parody, PAPAZ is at best worth a handful of chuckles. And at worst, it trundles along over the same stultifyingly trivial material that Austen herself was parodying two centuries ago. Read the original, tick it off your list, then go and watch Shaun of the Dead: that’s a real zombie rom-com.
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