“It is a truth universally acknowledged….” When Jane Austen first wrote this phrase in 1813 when Pride and Prejudice was published, I doubt she could conceive that almost two hundred years later, the words that followed it would read of zombies and their insatiable hunger for brains. Sure, it’s mainly due to the fact the word ‘zombie’ didn’t come into existence until 1819, but beyond that, there is still a feeling of unease regarding the association. It seems wrong to speak of zombies in the same breath as a novel the caliber of anything Austen wrote, let alone her most famous work.
Or so I thought.
When I first heard of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith’s parodistic take on the classic, I dismissed it immediately. It was a funny idea, but not for me - I fancied myself an Austen purist. However, when the novel was made into a movie, I decided to see it, if only to laugh at how bad it was. Much to my surprise, I found myself enjoying the film.
Now intrigued, I purchased the book and discovered that while the concepts of zombies and Jane Austen seem different, they actually work well together. In the new novel, we see Elizabeth Bennett and her sisters fighting off hordes of the undead, all while navigating the trials of love and the class system in nineteenth-century England. The result is a humorous and exciting but also romantic story that kept me enthralled just as much as the original.
What Grahame-Smith so intelligently does is that he finds a way to keep the bones and most of the meat of the original novel while adding a bit of speed to the plot. Readers will still recognize the plot points from the original story, from the various balls the Bennett sisters attend to the antics of Mr. Collins, but have replaced the talk of fabrics and the intricacies of courting with action sequences and tongue-in-cheek humor that holds attention, where the original may have lost it.
I still consider myself an Austen purist, but I think it was my pride that the title kept me from reading the new novel for so long. It is easy to stick to what you know and think anything else is unworthy, but a different voice doesn’t have to mean a different story. Sometimes, it just means a new way to look at things.
Published in Panama City Magazine