[gmw]

Well, I finally finished S & B Concluded

The preface again gets rather carried away - as if there weren't enough sermons in the story itself. It does, however, disclaim the author's ownership of at least some of the opinions expressed by his characters. He's explicit about some, but that still leaves a lot open to interpretation. One aspect he is explicit about is Clergymen jesting about religion, and he says:

To the believing hearer it brings the danger of loss of reverence for holy things, by the mere act of listening to, and enjoying, such jests; and also the temptation to retail them for the amusement of others. To the unbelieving hearer it brings a welcome confirmation of his theory that religion is a fable, in the spectacle of its accredited champions thus betraying their trust.

I find it a strange contradiction to hear a Christian speak of "holy things". Since when have any "things" been holy? I thought that's what the commandment about graven images was about. Anyway, to this unbeliever, hearing religious people jest is to believe they are human. (Perhaps the problem with that, from Carroll's perspective, is that it also admits their fallibility.) The view also seems at odds with Carroll's use of farce and humour in his work.


In this second-half of the story we have lost that dream-like quality which was, for me, one of the best parts of the first half. Instead of so subtly moving from one perspective to another that it sometimes caught you by surprise, now it's told explicitly: "I'm feeling 'eerie' ... Hi kids." I guess I can understand that, why shouldn't the narrator be developing more familiarity with the change? But it's not replaced by anything as attractive.

We get discourses on right and wrong from Arthur. I liked him better as the shy, tongue-tied man - the wuss was less annoying than the moralising know-it-all, with everyone pandering to his every word. We have a very long couple of chapters in which the mysterious Mein Herr tries to point out the ridiculousness of certain things by reciting stories from a society that took them to extremes. If such argument was valid we would conclude that drinking water was ridiculous - after all, drinking too much can kill you.


It seemed to me that it was in this second half of the story that the fragmentary beginnings of the story really show themselves. The potential that built in the first half withers away into simple disconnectedness. The farce of the Vice-Warden/Emperor, and his wife and son, is wrapped up in such a straight-forward manner that the earlier farce now seems out of place. Uggug is written off as "loveless" - as if that is somehow his fault. Arthur and Eric ... well, I wasn't surprised. The most consistent parts of the book were Bruno (the consistently annoying) and Sylvie (the consistently bland), neither of who appeared to learn anything, nor teach anything.

I find myself asking: What was the point? Did Carroll mean anything by any of it (other than his prefaces)? In Alice in Wonderland there was a pervasive feeling of joy and freedom, it felt to me like a celebration of many things. There is no such feeling in Sylvie and Bruno, if anything it is almost the reverse (and there's that annoying equivocation, "almost", that invades all my thoughts about this book.). In the preface to Sylvie and Bruno, Carroll said he wanted to do something different, well he was successful in that - if little else.

issybird summarised it as:

Originally Posted by issybird

What a mess. A glorious mess, in parts, but ultimately a failure, much as I loved some of it. [...]

And I think that says it well. There were some wonderful moments in there, but it all fades away into nothing much of anything.