is unusual but by no means unique. James Joyce started ‘Finnegans Wake’ midsentence, and ended in the same way. (The two fragments make sense as one complete sentence, making Finnegans Wake a book you can read over and over for the rest of your life.) But he was not the first writer to start a book this way. He may have got the idea from his favourite work of Lewis Carroll’s, Sylvie and Bruno.
Never heard of Sylvie and Bruno? Or its sequel, Sylvie and Bruno concluded? Not many people have. Despite Carroll considering them his best and most important works, they were a failure when published and have languished in obscurity every since. It’s not surprising. They alternate between the tedious and the twee. Each book is longer than both Alice books combined. They have three stories which are difficult to follow despite none of them having a particularly strong plot. The lead characters are a brother and sister team of cavity-causing sweetness, and Carroll has Bruno talk throughout in baby talk e.g. ‘oo’ for ‘you’ and ‘welly’ for ‘really.’ The books meander, bog down in philosophical discussion, and often bewilder. To get through them requires more perseverance than enjoyment.
That said, they are not without their charm and magical Carrollian moments. One character invents a map scale of 1:1, but he can’t use it due to complaints from farmers – it covers the entire country. So they use the country as its own map, and it does nearly as well. The Mad Gardener’s song, which is often anthologized, appears at fits and starts throughout both books. (“What Tottles meant” is rather good as well.) Bruno observes that evil is live backwards. It’s like watching one of Shakespeare’s lesser-performed plays; it becomes apparent why they are lesser-performed but they still have moments of which lesser writers can only dream.
The structure of the novels is complex. The narrator, known only as Sir, passes through three levels of existence. There is the real England, a fantasyland Outland, and the Fairy Kingdom. Sir, an elderly bachelor who may suffer from narcolepsy, passes from one world to the next without a word of warning to the reader, sometimes surprising himself. Sometimes the other characters in the other worlds are aware of him, at other times they are not.
In Outland, the Warden leaves his children, Sylvie and Bruno, to be cared for by his brother the Vice-Warden and wife, Tabikat, while he travels to Fairy Land. In his absence, the brother declares himself Emperor; In England, Sir follows the progress of a romance between his friends Arthur and Lady Muriel. The romance is interrupted by the attentions of another man, and an outbreak of disease in a nearby village. This is the most conventional part of the book, but also provides Carroll with opportunities to discuss his opinions on God, religion, sin, government, atheism, self-sacrifice and many other topics not usually found in a book aimed at children; In Fairy Land, the Warden becomes the Fairy King and Sylvie and Bruno have adventures.
As far as plot goes, that’s about it. As Carroll stated in his introduction, these books were an attempt to link together different materials, poems, stories, lines of dialogue and thoughts collected over many years into a single book. He calls the result ‘litterature’. As a result the book is much more self-conscious but perhaps also more revealing.
Sir is not the only character who moves between worlds. Sylvie and Bruno appear in all three. The Professor in Outland is Mein Herr in England and an eccentric in both. Lady Muriel is almost too good to be true. She is beautiful, intelligent, patient, loving, curious, and generous; maybe Carroll’s ideal woman. To make things more confusing, there is a strong implication that she and Sylvie are one and the same character, despite encountering each other in the real world. But Tabikat, Muriel’s shadow counterpart in Outland, is a fat, vain and foolish woman. One some level, Muriel, Sylvie and Tabikat are one and the same person – an idealised child, an idealised woman and a nightmare woman.
What this says about Carroll’s attitude towards women is anyone’s guess. Although long accepted as a repressed paedophile, more recent research suggests that this is a distortion, if not an outright slander, on Carroll’s character. Carroll enjoyed the company of many women of mature age, some of his relationships bordering on the scandalous. One theatre director (Carroll loved theatre, also scandalous for a Victorian clergyman) described Carroll as ‘a greying satyr in sheep’s clothing’. Sylvie and Lady Muriel are equally idealised in the novel, but I get the clear impression that Sir would much prefer to stay with the woman and not the child.
Carroll was aware of his fame as a writer for children and his role as a clergyman. As he got older, if he didn’t actually become more conservative, he certainly played the part. The ‘Alice’ books are famous in part because they have no moral. Sylvie and Bruno is dripping with them. Carroll used these books in part to preach to his audience – and they are the worse for that.
These are difficult books to read. It is no wonder that those who turn to these books looking for more Alice are disappointed. But this is not what Carroll set out to do. Carroll was an inventor in many areas, none more so than in his writing. With ‘Alice’ he thought he was ‘striking a new path in fairy-lore’ as indeed he was. Having been down that path once, (well, twice) he had no intention of going there again. His experiment, though failed, was bold. He may have even been ahead of his time. The Sylvie and Bruno books with their multiple plots in diverse worlds, surrealism, ad-hoc structure, and self-referential nature are, it’s been suggested, the first post-modern novel. They are certainly like no books of their time and structurally sit more comfortably in the Twentieth Century. Which brings me back to James Joyce. Ending an essay like this
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