Literary Mashup...and Zombies

In my usual hip and happ'nin fashion, I recently participated in a pop culture phenomenon: I pretended to send my six-year-old son up in a flimsy hot-air balloon in an effort to get a television show.

Just kidding. Really, I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.

I was inspired in part by slogging through (most of) (okay, some of) a literary classic, Don Quixote, for a book club. And yes, I felt a glow equivalent to the one you get from eating nothing but veggies and working out regularly. Therefore, I needed some Halloween candy. Also some way to get "The Impossible Dream" out of my head.

Although I contemplated re-reading the original Pride and Prejudice, I opted not to. I've been curious about P&P&Z because it is successful and because it has generated much discussion yet little outrage (at least in my cocoon). Also, I recently heard an interview with the publisher who thought up this idea (I'm behind on podcasts but I think it was mid-September, an episode of Q hosted by the lovely and talented Jian Ghomeshi) and this publisher told an interesting tale.

The form is, apparently, a literary mashup.

For those who are even less hip and with-it than I am--that is, the person to whom I happen to be married--a mashup is a combination of songs (and, nowadays, videos thereof) to make a new song (or video). Go here for definitions from the Urban Dictionary. The mashup is apparently mostly a music phenomenon, with crossovers to videos on YouTube.

And according to the Q interview, the publisher one day idly wondered what the literary equivalent of the mashup was. He wrote down a list of classics whose copyrights, conveniently, are lapsed and which are thus in the public domain--Moby Dick, Pride and Prejudice, Oliver Twist, and others. And then he made another list, this time of pop culture phenomena: zombies, sea monsters, vampires, monkeys, and others. And then he drew a line between the columns. When he connected Pride and Prejudice with zombies, he knew he had an excellent mash. Er, match. Or anyway, a title.

I liked that story a lot. How often do people stop at the "idle curiosity" step, without actually pursuing something innovative? Even I go only one step beyond idle curiosity, to decide that "someone" should do "something." That is, after all, the origin of my own venture, "Great Ideas for Other People," which I still can't figure out how to make into an actual business, but you heard about it here first.

So here's a rundown of my pop culture experience.

1. I had a difficult time finding the book. I looked high and low in fiction, under Austen and Smith. I looked on the store's computers 3 times to verify that the store had 23 copies on the shelves. And then I realized that the book must be shelved in one of those sections of the store I never go into: Horror. (Other sections I avoid include the yoga mat section, the computer reference book section, and the inspirational business section. If you see me there, I'm under duress--likely for a job.) Which also describes how I felt looking at the rest of the books in the section. Not exactly my cuppa.

2. So imagine my surprise to find that the book is kinda cute except when it's dumb. It has some fairly stupid gross-out humo(u)r (bodily functions, pus) and even a couple of off-colo(u)r jokes involving balls--both the kind you dance at and the kind that go into a musket. This aspect of the zombie story line is the least effective part of the combination.

3. In some cases, the addition of the zombie story line actually serves to make characters slightly more accessible to modern audiences. Charlotte Lucas has a pretty good reason for marrying Mr. Collins, for example--one that's comprehensible even to modern women. Mr. Bennet, too, has a different motivation that makes him not completely arbitrary and capricious. However, both characters retain enough of their original personalities so as not to spoil the storyline. The Wickham story is also resolved in a way that provides satisfaction to some modern readers.

4. In other cases, the story changes seem arbitrary. Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Gardiner both commit transgressions in the mashup that aren't in the original story. I was interested to see how those transgressions could help solidify or twist the original plot back on itself in an effective way--but they never did. A significant twist to the Charlotte/Mr. Collins storyline was equally "why?"

However, the questions in the Reader's Discussion Guide alone are worth the price of the book. Or at least a look-see in the bookstore. Read #6. Seriously.

Overall, it's like those miniature Mr. Goodbars--not bad for what they are, but not nearly as good as a Hershey's Special Dark miniature.

I did enjoy my foray into the mashup world. Always something to learn from popular culture. Though I think I might need an hour to dip into the original P&P. Just to cleanse the palate.