Book Review: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
I have a secret to confess: I love Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. It feels good to get it off my chest; I’ve been hiding our relationship, perhaps not well, for years. Yet my love affair with P&P didn’t start out so well, P&P was assigned reading for AP English Lit class my senior year of high school. Like many seniors in high school, I had a bit of trouble motivating myself to do my schoolwork, and Merciless Mercer, my teacher, didn’t inspire me to do much more than sit as far from her in the classroom as possible. I didn’t finish a single one of the many novels we were assigned in that class (lest you think me a total slacker, I read every play, poem, and short story). I think it was a quiet, self-destructive form of rebellion; I’d always done my readings in every other English class but I had more important things on my mind (namely a real-life version of the subject matter explored in P&P, like most 18 year olds). I really started to fall for P&P when a friend checked out the BBC’s mini-series version from the library the summer after graduation, we spent many hours enthralled by the characters, costumes, and story. If I’d been able to picture Mr. Darcy as Colin Firth when I’d been assigned the book, no doubt I would have been able to finish it. Whenever A&E would play the P&P mini-series I would stop what I was doing and watch it, all five hours of it, often enticing even the most macho of my family members to get sucked into the drama.
In graduate school, when DVDs started getting cheap, I bought the BBC mini-series, and I watched it, a lot! Whenever I would get depressed about my love life, or lack-there-of, I would pull out the P&P DVDs and lose myself in Jane Austen’s world, usually watching all five hours at one go. This happened more than I would care to admit. Eventually I decided to go ahead and try to read the novel again, this time finishing it easily. It’s been many years now since I’ve felt the need to watch P&P for a romantic escape, but I still watch it from time to time, just for sheer enjoyment. And I’ve seen all the other reiterations, the Kiera Knightly version of P&P, the Bollywood take “Bride and Prejudice,” and “The Jane Austen Book Club” film. I’ve read both Bridget Jones novels and adore the first “Bridget Jones’ Diary” film (in case you didn’t know, Bridget Jones is a blatant, modern-day rip-off of P&P, with both movies even having the same Mr. Darcy). I’ve read novels written by modern day writers trying to explore what happened after P&P. I’ve also read a set of books that are a contemporary writer’s attempt to tell P&P from Mr. Darcy’s perspective (she took three books to do it). The P&P world is a bit of guilty pleasure for me, you see, I generally eschew “romance novels” and P&P is widely considered to be the original.
When I saw Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, I was outraged: how dare someone be so sacrilegious to poor Jane?!? My initial reaction was quickly overcome with amusement at the concept. I choose Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for my book club selection with the thought: I like musical mash-ups, so why not a literary one? This novel takes the classic P&P tale of Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy and adds a dash of ninjas and a sprinkle of zombies. The “undead” have become a nuisance in polite British society, waylaying carriages, eating brains, and just generally making themselves unwelcome. Not only does society value manners and breeding, it also values proficiency with sword and musket (even if guns are unladylike). The British have turned to the far East for fighting skills, with the wealthiest training in Japan, with lower ranking families traveling to China for training. The zombie plague even affects some of the inner circle the main characters. In the end, it’s still P&P. I’m not sure how well the zombie thing really works, the words just seem wrong. Elizabeth Bennett discussing dojos and self-mutilation cannot blend with the prose of Austen, or at least it doesn’t in this novel. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the book, and chuckle at the new additions from time to time. In the end though, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a gimmick, and though fun to read, unless you feel like refreshing your P&P, it may not be worth your time.