Jeff Noon
Automated Alice
“Think Borges crossed with Philip Larkin on acid and you’ve got some idea of the power of its very English enchantment.” – Arena
In the last years of his life, the fantasist Lewis Carroll wrote a third Alice book. This mysterious work was never published or even shown to anybody.
It has only recently been discovered. Now, at last, the world can read of Automated Alice and her fabulous adventures in the future.
That’s not quite true. Automated Alice was in reality written by Zenith O’Clock, the writer of wrongs. In the book he sends Alice through time, tumbling from the Victorian age to land in 1998, in Manchester, a small town in the North of England.
Oh dear, that’s not at all right. This trequel to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was actually written by Jeff Noon. Zenith O’Clock is only a character invented by Jeff Noon and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely accidental. What Alice encounters in the automated future is mostly accidental too… a series of misadventures, even weirder than your dreams.
“Captures Carroll’s style effortlessly… a weird Alice with a contemporary edge.” – Mail on Sunday
“A wild, psychedelic vision… I doubt that there will be a more joyously inventive book published in Britain this year.” – Manchester Evening News
Now in my trembling days I seek
All comfort to be found
In contemplation of the past;
When we rowed aground
At Godstow on the Thames’ bank,
With my sweet Alice bound.
And there beneath a spreading elm
I told a tale of joy
To a child who smiled to hear
This older man’s employ.
But now that girl is married to
Some fine and dashing boy.
And I am near my maker’s house,
There to sup the chalice,
With
one last tale to tell as time
Works my shape with malice;
Of how a child will become my
Automated Alice.
Now in these final days I seek
To find a future clime;
In which my Alice can escape
The radishes of time.
Faster, faster ticks the clock that
Turns to end this rhyme.
Through the Clock’s Workings
Alice was beginning to feel very drowsy from having nothing to do. How strange it was that doing absolutely nothing at all could make one feel so tired. She slumped down even deeper into her armchair. Alice was visiting her Great Aunt Ermintrude’s house in Didsbury, Manchester; a frightful city in the North of England which was full of rain and smoke and noise and big factories making Heaven-knows-what. “I wonder how you do make Heaven-knows-what?” thought Alice to herself. “Perhaps they get the recipe from somebody who’s only recently died?”
The thought of that made Alice shiver so much that she clutched at her doll ever so tightly! Her Great Aunt was a very strict old lady and she had given Alice this doll as a present with the words, “Alice, the doll looks just like you when you’re in a tantrum.” Alice thought that the doll looked nothing like her at all, despite the fact that her Great Aunt had sewn it an exact (if rather smaller) replica of Alice’s favourite pinafore; the splendidly warm and red one she was currently wearing. Alice called the doll Celia, not really knowing the reason for her choice. Alice would often do things without knowing why, and this made her Great Aunt very angry indeed: “Alice, my dear,” she would pronounce, “can’t you make sense for once?”
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