Alice In tumblr-Land (And Other Fairy Tales For A New Generation) by Tim Manley / Penguin Books / 2013 / 978-0143124795 / 272 pages
“Curiouser and curiouser” was Alice’s commentary on the world she found down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carol’s Alice In Wonderland. While the land she found herself in was populated by hookah smoking caterpillars, pocket watch bearing white rabbits, vanishing talking cats and other strange and somewhat scary beings, it probably wasn’t half so strange as the rabbit hole of social networks we currently live in.
There is no mythical or fantastic country I can think of stranger than the lands of a thousand unknown “Friends” which is Facebook or the 140 characters of sometimes meaningless chatter constituting Twitter. Mobile phones and tablets are the looking glasses of today. Faces glued to screens, oblivious to the world around them, people enter into a cyber world as unreal and made up as any created by the Brother’s Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson. All of which makes a new book by Tim Manley, Alice In tumblr-Land (And Other Fairy Tales For A New Generation), published by Penguin a pleasure to read on many levels.
Snow White, King Arthur, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel and the rest of the fairy tale/folk hero gang, live in the world of social media. Chicken Little feeds her paranoia by Googling illnesses, Snow has fantasies about Ryan Gosling while perusing online photos and Beauty worries what her chic friends will think of Beast. Cinderella divorced the Prince (he wasn’t gay, just kind of a prick) and moved back in with her stepmother, vowing never to wear glass slippers ever again – it’s Crocs all the way for this modern girl while Arthur and Lancelot have jobs in the sharp end of the service industry and are typical twenty-something slackers.
Manley, the creator of the blog, Fairy Tales For Twenty-somethings, has put the book together along the lines of blog posts or daily status updates on a social media site. Instead of chapters telling each character’s story, each page contains a small blurb and an illustration (all illustrations by the author) of what at first appears to be meaningless pieces of information. All right, it’s sort of cute Snow White has the hots for Gosling. (He’s not related to the Ugly Duckling is he?) Or, how after pulling the sword from the stone, before becoming king, Arthur takes off on a road trip which includes stops at Burning Man and learning how to make a guitar out of cigar box on the streets of New Orleans.
But like status updates they are merely moments without context or substance. You don’t learn anything about a person, or a character, from these types of truncated thoughts. Thankfully Manley understands this, and doesn’t just leave it at that. For he uses these blurbs to gradually tell us each person’s story. As we continue to read he keeps circling back to his characters gradually revealing more and more about each one.
As the book unfolds you start to see the imaginative and mischievous ways Manley has brought these classic figures into the modern world. He’s taken elements of each story and combined these with a character’s most distinctive traits to create thoroughly modern versions of the folk/fairy tale. Poor Robin Hood is having a hard time spreading his message of social equality. The whole robbing from the rich and giving to the poor thing just doesn’t seem to be working. Changing the world is a lot harder than he thought it would be. Sure it was working on a local level, but what about nationally and globally? Going on the Sheriff’s day time talk show wasn’t any help – as a firm proponent of trickle down economics he and Robin had a hard time finding anything they could talk about except their mutual liking of ice cream.
As if things weren’t bad enough Robin found he was having a hard time opening up about what was on his mind to those closest to him. He was even reticent around his oldest friend Little John. Is this what aging does to you, you slowly just stop talking about things he wondered? However, not to worry. Robbin eventually figures things out and develops a whole social media campaign to get his message to the world.
Originally fairy tales and similar stories were written as a means of teaching a moral lesson or something simiilar about the world we live in. Over the years, and thanks to the sentimentality of a certain entertainment conglomerate based out of Florida and California, the lessons have either been diluted or lost. Not only has Manley updated the stories and the characters, he has also restored their original purpose. I don’t mean he has made them into modern day morality tales, but he uses them to help us see what’s happening in the world around us just a little more clearly.
While it might be funny to think of Sleeping Beauty as suffering from depression, Chicken Little from panic disorder and anxiety and The Ugly Duckling using her superior intellect to cover up her insecurity about her appearance, Manley’s descriptions of their conditions gradually becomes uncomfortably accurate. In fact the more we read about each of them, the more poignant their stories become. However, like all good fairy tales, each of their stories has a happy ending. Chicken Little goes into therapy to deal with issues from her childhood and starts hot yoga classes, Sleeping Beauty met up with her old buddy the Prince for coffee and he listened and understood why she was sad which made her feel better, while The Ugly Duckling saw some pictures from her high school reunion posted on Facebook and realized, while she might not be beautiful, she looked right.
As we read about each of the characters we begin to think of them less in terms of who they were originally and more as people dealing with life as we know it. While Manley’s illustrations remind us of their fairy tale origins through his use of familiar distinguishing characteristics, his writing turns them into something quite different. They are more than just cute cartoons or figures from stories in our past, they are characters whose concerns and problems are ones we understand. Of course humour is a big part of the book, but underneath the laughter is an insightful mind who understands the foibles and frailties of being human with compassion and empathy.
Social media is a fact of life whether we like it or not. Marshall McLuhan said the media is the message. Through their choice of media some people attempt to send a message or even comment on the media itself. Manley, while maybe poking fun at people’s obsessions with social networks and the Internet, embraces the form required for its utilization and gives us an indication of its potential as a means of real communication while neither condemning nor advocating its usage. In his stories the Internet is an accepted part of life just as it is for all of us.
Alice In tumblr-Land (And Other Fairy Tales For A New Generation) is a humorous and intelligent look at life in the 21st century as seen through the eyes of familiar figures from the fairy tales of our childhood. While its sub-title implies the book is geared towards a specific generation the content and humour will appeal to almost anyone. Not only is it a lot of fun to read, it is also thought provoking and smart. Like the fairy tale books of our childhoods Manley’s illustrations complement the writing and play an integral part in their telling. Unlike those books however, these stories are firmly based in our current reality and the happy endings aren’t dependent on anyone being rescued by a handsome prince.
@fairytalefor20s says
fwiw, I’m very grateful for this review of Alice in Tumblr-land at @EmptyMirror, esp 2nd to last paragraph.