The Miguel Batista Memorial BookcLLub: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I’ll have to catch up on the next installment. I’ll be at home so I’ll have more free time to read.

Is that how P&P is or did they condense things down?

I really hate the Mother, she’s such a boring bitty. I realize it was a different era but ugh, I would not want her as a mother in law.

I agree with Kermit that I like how every time the book starts to drag a zombie sequence seems to show up. I don’t think I could read this book very far without the added zombies and the irreverence that is there.

The father just seems like such a snarky bastard in this version.

I’ll throw out a link to my post from the MBMBC: Genesis.
http://www.lookoutlanding.com/2009/5/11/872099/the-miguel-batista-memorial-book#15575648
I had Lonesome Dove, Blood and Thunder, Master and Commander, Memoirs of a Geisha, Girl With a Pearl Earring, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, and some baseball books I haven’t read but am intrigued by.

Also, a sampling of Miguel Batista’s prose may be found here:
http://www.lookoutlanding.com/2009/5/11/872099/the-miguel-batista-memorial-book#15575648

by the way, the original title of P&P was “First impressions”

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1342

I prefer the PDF one, although I’ve been reading an old-fashioned book version alongside P&P&Z.

I wrote this yesterday, but decided to sleep on it. So here goes. I’ve got some thoughts and questions about the state of Britain during the Regency that I’ll type up a little later, but here’s what’s been on my mind. First, I’ve really enjoyed reading PPZ. I never could get through the first four or five chapters of P&P until I started reading PPZ – I read a few chapters of Austen, then the same chapters in PPZ, rinse and repeat. But as I kept reading I began enjoying the Austen more and the PPZ less – although I’m still enjoying both. Here’s why I think this might be.

I PPZ’s biggest weakness is that Seth Graeme-Smith just doesn’t know much about Regency-era England – its customs, its conventions of dialogue, you name it. That means Graeme-Smith doesn’t write his new material in convincing Regency-era style prose. I’d love to see what, say, The Onion’s writers, who can perfectly mimic almost any literary voice imaginable, would do with a concept like P&P&Z (see Our Dumb Century – especially the 1765 "Mercantile Onion" broadsheet and the early 1900s section). It’s rather jarring to jump from Austen’s prose to Graeme-Smith’s; it feels like you jump back and forth between several centuries with each chapter you read.

DIALOGUE
Some of the time, Graeme-Smith is great. I especially like page 80-82, when the zombies kill the kitchen staff. Mr. Bingley announcing, "Mr. Darcy, if I may have the pleasure of your company in the kitchen" captures that era’s English sensibility perfectly, as it does when he "politely vomited into his hands." I also loved this part: "Mr. Bingley observed the desserts his poor servants had been attending to at the time of their demise – a delightful array of tarts, exotic fruits, and pies, sadly soiled by blood and brains, and thus unusable" (80).

But beyond this and a few other passages, there’s almost no wry or polite understatement in his writing (especially from the Bennets). PPZ needs way more of this to create more convincing dialogue. This would make the shocking bluntness Graeme-Smith likes to give the characters much more funny and effective.

Another weird thing: Mr. Bennet asks his wife to "spare me the expense of having your lips sewn shut" (88). Dude, WTF? That’s totally over the line – no gentleman would speak to his wife like that in front of others. I know Mrs. Bennet is annoying, but still. The joke, I guess, is in Mr. Bennet being shockingly blunt, but it makes no sense in the context of the story and just gives it even less internal consistency.

An amazon.com reviewer wrote "1) the Regency-era uber-polite Bennetts try to avoid talking about zombies so they call them “unmentionables” – but then they talk about them non-stop and 75% of the time call them zombies. It’s like the author didn’t quite have the writing discipline to enforce the kind of conversational discipline rife in the era." I think I agree with that.

GENDER ROLES
Another thing makes no sense. Carrying muskets and kitana swords is so un-ladylike that the Bennet sisters felt compelled to make the journey from Longbourn to Netherfield armed only with their ankle-daggers (27). So how on earth do they feel they can get away with killing anyone, male or female, who insults them – e.g. Darcy (13) or Mr. Collins (52). In real life, the only situation where violence was acceptable in polite society, dueling, had to take place between male social equals – and that rarely result in death.

Elizabeth tells Darcy: "I too live by the warrior code, and would gladly kill if my honour demanded it" (46). But I don’t think this warrior code and the cult of femininity can co-exist, even in a parody. It completely kills the internal consistency of the story’s world.

CHARACTERS
Also, the characters Seth Graeme-Smith writes are pretty strange, I think.
I think the warrior Elizabeth in P&P&Z seems to have very little in common with Austen’s Elizabeth. Collins sees in Elizabeth’s eyes "a darkness, a kind of absence – as if her soul had taken leave, so that compassion and warmth could not interfere" (58) – but that almost psychopathic quality persists in all the Elizabeth material Graeme-Smith writes, not just when the parts where she’s in combat. It’s funny sometimes, but it’s also pretty bizarre.