How Lewis Carroll Inspired the Mad Genius of Jeff Noon

I was introduced to the books of Lewis Carroll at an early age. I can remember a teacher reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass to us, and then reading them myself, and seeing the various film and cartoon versions. Of course as I got older, such childish tales were put aside.
But later, in my teenage years, I rediscovered the books in the college library. Actually, it wasn’t the Carroll novels that I found that day, but a book about them—Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice. I already knew Gardner through the collected “Mathematical Games” columns he wrote for Scientific American magazine.
In The Annotated Alice he teases out and elaborates on many of the ideas and coded messages that Carroll wove through the two Alice books. It’s not so much an explanation, more an X-Ray of a mystery. Alice truly comes alive in Gardner’s books, and Carroll’s genius is fully revealed.

I loved that book so much: I was exactly the right age, seventeen or eighteen, and filled with equal passions for both Art and Mathematics.
Some years later, when I’d become a playwright, I can remember staring at Gardner’s book as it lay on my desk and seeing in my mind’s eye the title change to The Automated Alice. I jotted this phrase down in my notebook, thinking it might become a theatre play one day. In fact, a decade or more would have to pass before I next took up that thread, and in a manner I could never have predicted at the time.
When Martin Gardner retired from Scientific American, a writer and scientist named Douglas Hofstadter took over the column. He anagrammatised “Mathematical Games” into “Metamagical Themas,” making plain the shared debt to Lewis Carroll.

In 1979 Hofstadter published a book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I bought this at the time, on the strength of the reviews. The whole book has one job, in essence, to explain Kurt Gödel’s Theory of Incompleteness to the lay person.
It’s not an easy book by any means. In fact, it took me four attempts before I managed to get through it all. For a few weeks after finishing it, with Gödel’s theory fresh in my mind, I truly felt I was sitting on the mountain peak of wisdom! Complete, rather than incomplete. Of course, the exquisitely tangled complications of the theory soon disappeared, and I returned with a bump to earth. The book, all 777 pages of it, is suffused with the spirit of Carroll: logic games, word puzzles, magic tricks, visual puns, paradoxes. Both Gardner and Hofstadter knew the secret that Carroll first revealed: very complicated processes can be explained in an entertaining manner, and the learning is just as great.

Whenever I skim through the pages of Gödel, Escher, Bach these days I’m always amused at how many themes I took from it to form the inspiration behind my first novel, Vurt. And in the writing of my subsequent novels, I found myself allowing more and more Carrollian type ideas to enter the narratives.
In fact, the central story structure that I return to again and again could well be taken from the two Alice books: the lonely child, the difficult family life, the descent into a fantasy land, the trial and rigors of a journey through a strange and barely understandable region: it’s all there in Vurt, Pollen, Needle in the Groove, Channel SK1N, and so on.

In Falling Out of Cars I imagined the broken pieces of Alice’s magical looking glass and the various people who were looking for them in a transformed England. For my third novel I went back to the Automated Alice idea and found myself writing an imagined sequel to the first two Carroll books. Many times during the process I felt myself taken over by the man’s creative spirit. Indeed, when I glance at Automated Alice’s pages now, it seems impossible that I actually wrote those words and made up all those puns and philosophical jokes! Surely, another writer was at work.
So, Alice’s adventures have always been important to me. Other writers and artists have also taken inspiration from the same source: Alan Moore and Grant Morrison have both created works featuring Alice, either the real life version (Alice Pleasance Liddell) or her fictional counterpart.
Terry Gilliam’s animations in Monty Python’s Flying Circus could easily be Carroll pushed through a 1960s weird hippy blender. David Lynch’s television drama series Twin Peaks reimagines Wonderland as a dangerous, surreal, perverse, twisted version of small-town America.
In contrast, Tim Burton’s blockbuster version of Alice in Wonderland has very little of the work’s original spirit, instead forcing the story into the standard three act, moralistic structure of the Hollywood movie. All the expensive state-of-the-art CGI in the world won’t replace the simple enduring power of the human imagination. Carroll says more in a few lines of witty prose, or a nonsense poem.

My latest novel, A Man Of Shadows, is a mixture of the science fiction and detective genres, following a private eye through three different regions of a city. Dayzone is an area where the lights never go out and the sky lies hidden behind a vast platform of lamps. Nocturna is the eternally darkened area, where people go when they require darkness. Between Day and Night lies a mysterious zone called Dusk. One character describes it as the subconscious of the city, a place where all our dreams and nightmares reside.
The private eye’s journey through this fog-bound, surreal twilight realm mirrors in many ways Alice’s journeys through her own regions of the inner mind: they both encounter people and creatures evil and benign, surprisingly everyday and outrageously bizarre. Indeed, the fiction writing process itself can very often seem like just such an undertaking, a walk through strange lands in search of imagined, hoped for treasure. Over the years, I’ve found Lewis Carroll to be a fine traveling companion.
A Man of Shadows is available August 1.