{"id":1363,"date":"2011-10-18T11:49:43","date_gmt":"2011-10-18T16:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/?p=1363"},"modified":"2013-03-06T16:31:53","modified_gmt":"2013-03-06T21:31:53","slug":"sequel-and-sensibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/?p=1363","title":{"rendered":"Sequel and Sensibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

PD James at 91 is about to publish her novel, Death Comes to Pemberly<\/em><\/a>, a mystery-murder sequel to Pride and Prejudice<\/em>.\u00a0 No need to worry — Wickham, seducer of teenagers and the rake you love to hate, is the one who gets it.<\/p>\n

James has stated she always wanted to do this.\u00a0\u00a0 Godspeed.\u00a0 Short of murder, ninety-one year olds should be able to do whatever they’d like.<\/p>\n

But how do we (myself and anyone who cares to comment) feel <\/em>about this? Is this, as Martha Stewart would say, \u201ca good thing”?<\/p>\n

In principle I’m not against sequels, prequels, and reboots written by authors who didn’t write the original, but I have my own rules for which ones interest me.<\/p>\n

There are sequels that happen because readers can’t let a character go.\u00a0\u00a0 This seems most prevalent in detective fiction, with authors continuing to write books featuring Sherlock Holmes, or in the case of Perchance to Dream<\/a>, <\/em> Philip Marlowe.\u00a0 Have any of these ever surpassed the original or even come close?<\/p>\n

Perchance to Dream<\/em> by Robert S. Parker was officially sanctioned by Chandler’s heirs after Parker had completed Poodle Springs<\/em><\/a>, Chandler’s unfinished last novel.\u00a0 Authorized sequels may work for hardcore fans but they box writers in.\u00a0 Parker said he wouldn’t do another because he “didn’t want to spend [his] life writing some other guy’s books” <\/a><\/p>\n

There is also, of course fanfiction<\/a> which doesn’t enter into the “official” canon, and is often written by amateurs.\u00a0 This is more prevalent when the originals were\u00a0 television series or even comics as opposed to novels, and almost always when they are of a particular genre, especially science fiction and fantasy.<\/p>\n

Another example of the authorized sequel is Rhett Butler’s People<\/em><\/a> by Donald McCraig. Authorized stories bring with them restrictions. McCraig had to maneuver around the overt racism and defense of chattel slavery embedded within the point of view of the original, which would not sit well with modern readers, while at the same time not\u00a0 wavering too much from its conception of its characters.\u00a0 He chose to ignore the storyline imagined in the previous continuation, Scarlett<\/em><\/a> by Alexandra Ripley, a bodice ripper, set after the original, in which Scarlett goes to Ireland, where race is not an issue.\u00a0 McCraig downplayed the love story, and focused instead on deepening our understanding of the protagonist. The book\u00a0 received a decent critical reception,, but didn’t do well with hardcore fans. While Ripley\u2019s sequel was panned, it was a commercial success, giving readers what they wanted, more than eight hundred pages of\u00a0 Scarlett.<\/p>\n

Sequels authorized or not, that stay close to the intent and perspective of the original, are primarily written to please fans and sell books. \u00a0They don’t bring anything new,\u00a0 except possibly an ending in cases where the writer didn’t finish the story, or a resolution to a part of the story the creator left hanging.\u00a0 By their nature, they\u00a0 do better if they are offering more of the same.<\/p>\n

Recently, there’s been an invasion, of horror-parodies, pioneered by Quirk Books<\/a>. These include Pride and Prejudice with Zombies<\/em>, Sense and Sensibility with Sea Monsters<\/em> and The Meowmorphosis<\/em>, in which Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant adorable kitten.\u00a0 I will confess to never having read any of them and having no interest in doing so.\u00a0 A five-minute sketch or YouTube video I could see, but they are stunts, not novels.<\/p>\n

Another kind of continuation, taking place in what Lost<\/em> fans might call the “sideways-verse”<\/a> is a bit more interesting.\u00a0 These books deconstruct the original, recounting the story in a way the original writer never could have imagined.\u00a0 A great example is Jean Rhys’\u00a0 Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>which brings us Jane Eyre<\/em> as seen through the eyes of\u00a0 the madwoman in the attic herself and her keeper.\u00a0 A fully realized tale of Rochester’s first wife, Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em> is set partly in the West Indies and deals with racism, colonialism, and the powerlessness of women to control their own destiny.<\/p>\n

There is also a very unauthorized\u00a0 take on Gone with the Wind<\/em>. The Wind Done Gone<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0 by Alice Randall, tells the story from the perspective of a completely “new” character, Scarlett’s slave half-sister — the child of Mammy and Scarlett’s father. \u00a0Randall’s story gives us a different take not only on the characters we know from the original, but on the ones we barely see — the house slaves who have their own agendas.\u00a0 The problem with Randall’s book when compared to Rhys’ is that Rhys parodied a true classic still taken seriously, while Randall looked at a story so dated by its racism and nostalgia for the “old south” that one wonders if a parody was even needed. In terms of readership, Rhys was offering something new, a way to examine issues around feminism, race, class, and colonialism by hearing from characters who didn’t normally get their own books — Creole women, British servants. By the time Randall’s book came along, we already had original stories about the ante-bellum South told from the point of view of slaves.\u00a0 Who was her readership?\u00a0 Fans and apologists for GWTW <\/em>wouldn’t be interested, and she’s not telling people who dislike the original anything they don’t already know.\u00a0 To pull off the deconstruction model, you have to be deconstructing something that serious people still take seriously.<\/p>\n

And so back to James.\u00a0 Will Death Comes to Pemberly<\/em> be a success?\u00a0 Commercially, I predict it will be a smashing one. I’ll buy a copy.\u00a0 James is not Austen, but she’s no slouch as a stylist. She knows how to tell a story, especially a mystery.\u00a0 She has a huge audience even without the Austenites, and the Austenites won’t be able to resist.\u00a0 She admits to having had a lifelong passion for Austen’s work.\u00a0 She’s writing, in a sense, professionalized fanfic — not authorized, not the same genre, but told with\u00a0 love and respect for the source.\u00a0 Most likely, she’ll present the characters as we know them.\u00a0 Darcy will not have turned into a wife-beating philanderer. Elizabeth will still be Elizabeth.\u00a0 And if Mr. Collins is a less than passionate husband, or Mary has never married, but has chosen to set up housekeeping with a female friend, we won’t delve too deeply. Will it have the reverence of an authorized version?\u00a0 I suspect it will, to the extent that it will strive for historical accuracy and won’t veer far from our expectations of how characterize will behave.<\/p>\n

Will it tell us anything about Austen’s world that Austen herself was unable to perceive? \u00a0Doubtfully. If Darcy’s money comes from plantations in the West Indies, we won’t learn about the conditions of the workers..\u00a0 The servants at Pemberly will continue to be mostly invisible.\u00a0 The resolution of the mystery will not reveal a larger rot at the core of society.<\/p>\n

Yet, by bringing in murder most foul, won’t something change?\u00a0 This is to be a mystery, not a love story or one that ends, like most of Austen, in a marriage. Then again, perhaps an announcement of Kitty’s engagement will come in the final chapter,\u00a0 assuming of course she isn’t exposed as a murderer and hanged for killing her brother-in-law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

PD James at 91 is about to publish her novel, Death Comes to Pemberly, a mystery-murder sequel to Pride and Prejudice.\u00a0 No need to worry — Wickham, seducer of teenagers and the rake you love to hate, is the one who gets it. James has stated she always wanted to do this.\u00a0\u00a0 Godspeed.\u00a0 Short of … Continue reading Sequel and Sensibility<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sitemap_exclude":false,"_sitemap_priority":"","_sitemap_frequency":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[107,55,71],"tags":[353,350,349,354,347,345,352,346,351,348],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1363"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1945,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions\/1945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marioninnyc.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}