"Automated Alice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Noon Jeff)

Jeff Noon Automated Alice

"Think Borges crossed with Philip Larkin on acid and you've got some idea of the power of its very English enchantment." -- Arena

In the last years of his life, the fantasist Lewis Carroll wrote a third Alice book. This mysterious work was never published or even shown to anybody.

It has only recently been discovered. Now, at last, the world can read of Automated Alice and her fabulous adventures in the future.

That's not quite true. Automated Alice was in reality written by Zenith O'Clock, the writer of wrongs. In the book he sends Alice through time, tumbling from the Victorian age to land in 1998, in Manchester, a small town in the North of England.

Oh dear, that's not at all right. This trequel to Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass was actually written by Jeff Noon. Zenith O'Clock is only a character invented by Jeff Noon and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely accidental. What Alice encounters in the automated future is mostly accidental too... a series of misadventures, even weirder than your dreams.

"Captures Carroll's style effortlessly... a weird Alice with a contemporary edge." -- Mail on Sunday

"A wild, psychedelic vision... I doubt that there will be a more joyously inventive book published in Britain this year." -- Manchester Evening News

Now in my trembling days I seek

All comfort to be found

In contemplation of the past;

When we rowed aground

At Godstow on the Thames' bank,

With my sweet Alice bound.


And there beneath a spreading elm

I told a tale of joy

To a child who smiled to hear

This older man's employ.

But now that girl is married to

Some fine and dashing boy.


And I am near my maker's house,

There to sup the chalice,

With one last tale to tell as time

Works my shape with malice;

Of how a child will become my

Automated Alice.


Now in these final days I seek

To find a future clime;

In which my Alice can escape

The radishes of time.

Faster, faster ticks the clock that

Turns to end this rhyme.