Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Penned by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a Quirk Classics adaptation of Jane Austen’s original 19th century romance.
The story, for those of you not already familiar with the original, follows the outspoken Elizabeth Bennet and her family of gossiping sisters as they try and marry their way up the social ladder. Of course it’s a little bit more complicated than that, but given the fact that this particular title prides itself on getting rid of all the ‘boring bits’ and inserting zombies in their place, you will already have a pretty accurate picture of what this book is all about.
The problem of course, comes in the fact that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies really doesn’t know quite what it wants to be.
On the one hand, we have a Jane Austen classical romance, and on the other we have a fairly average, rather mundane book about zombies. If you’re going to take a classic piece of literature and turn it on its head then you might as well at least be whole-hearted in your attempt to rewrite it. Simply cutting out bits and replacing them with zombies just doesn’t cut it I’m afraid. What we’re left with then, is what I can only describe as a mess.
A mess because as I have alluded to already, on the one hand we have a ‘bastardised’ version of Jane Austen’s original, with I note, a substantial amount of the ‘good stuff’ (i.e. the characterisation) removed, and in its place we have characters such as the schizophrenic Elizabeth Bennet who likes to rip people’s hearts out yet at the same time is supposed to be somehow believable in her yearning love for Mr Darcy.
And if the book wasn’t a confused jumble of contradictions already, we have the fact that the book just isn’t funny.
This was a book written on the back of a single joke. A single joke that was for some reason expected to keep the reader entertained for 317 gruelling pages. The joke dear readers, is that it’s the 19th century, and guess what… there are zombies! Ok, maybe I’m being a bit harsh: there are in fact two jokes in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and I admit I did laugh at the quip about Mr Darcy’s balls, but that, dear readers, was the only time.
So there we have it: — two jokes, a jumble of contradictions and an awful lot of zombies.
I wanted to like this book, I really did, but I’m afraid the joke just wore thin. If you want quirky adult humour, read Robert Rankin. If you want horror, read Stephen King. If you want Jane Austen… then read Jane Austen!
