Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, oh my!

I came across the New York Times bestseller “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith while browsing through Amazon.com’s suggestions for me. I was instantly intrigued. Being a fan of both “Pride and Prejudice” and zombies, I thought all of my dreams were about to come true. So I bought the book and read it, laughed many times out loud (it’s illustrated, too!), and began to wonder: did Seth Grahame-Smith have the right to do this to one of the most praised novels of classic English literature?
During my research I discovered that anything written before 1923 is under public domain—which entitles Grahame-Smith with the legal right to rewrite “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen. Well, okay. It’s legal. But is it ethical? Here I turned to the only source where people can publish their thoughts on almost anything: the internet.
Comments on Amazon.com range anywhere from “Does a Disservice to Zombie Stories (oh, and Austen, too)” and “Excellent Concept + Terrible Execution = Big Disappointment” (one star ratings) to “All classics should be rewritten with ninjas and zombies” and “Miss Austen Applauds” (five star ratings).  However, most of the ‘one star’ comments were not about the blasphemous action of mangling classic literature but about the author’s poor writing (ahem, rewriting). A few people mentioned that we shouldn’t continue to “dumb down” the great works of literature or that Jane Austen would turn in her grave (however, as she has been dead for 192 years, there wouldn’t be much left to turn, even if she was a zombie) if she knew that the story she worked so hard to create was turned into a horrific amalgamation of her own classic literature and something she could have no understanding of (that is, zombies as we know them today). Nevertheless, most of the critical comments were about the poor execution of this brilliant idea and not about the poor ethics surrounding it.
Grahame-Smith, the “co-author”, says that “when you take a look at the original book, it's almost as if, subconsciously, Jane Austen is laying out the perfect groundwork for an ultraviolent bone-crushing zombie massacre to take place.” Interesting, I think, since there is no way she could have possibly known what a zombie is. Even if the “real” zombies (those associated with Haitian voudou) were known to Austen, her “perfect groundwork” does not make sense because those zombies are not the violent, brain-eating corpses that are so familiar to us.
Despite all of the controversy, criticism, and question of ethics, I do find this book to be highly entertaining. Grahame-Smith is not a Jane Austen expert, but he does an excellent job, in my opinion, of introducing zombies to “Pride and Prejudice” with a style not unlike that of Jane Austen. I highly recommend this book to anyone who can laugh.
Quirk Classics, the publisher of “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, will release the title of its next publication on July 15, 2009. Will it be “Wuthering Heights and Werewolves” or “Romeo and Juliet and Vampires”? Only time can tell which classics are safe.
 

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