Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

By Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Reviewed by Alistair Radley

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

From the cover to the addendum – a Reader’s Discussion Guide, this is a reworking of a classic of English literature – with zombies; the same number of chapters, the same basic underlying story – with zombies. This works both ways – if you like Jane Austen – you may appreciate Grahame-Smith’s changes and additions to the original work and the fact his tongue is jammed firmly in his cheek. If you wouldn’t, and think the very concept that adding a veneer of George Romero’s ‘Night of the Living Dead’ mixed in with more than a little of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Kill Bill’ to one of your literary favourites is a recipe for disaster – stay well clear.

Austen was forced on many of us over the course of attempting to teach young people some appreciation of both the history of the English class structure in Napoleonic England and the development of the novel. Austen is surprisingly readable after you get used to her writing style which employs phenomenally long sentences written in ‘indirect speech’ as the book is narrated by its female protagonist, Eliza Bennett as she relays to us her personal drama dealing with “matters of upbringing, marriage, moral rightness and education in her aristocratic society” (thank you Wikipedia) and her love interest and male protagonist, Fitzwilliam Darcy – but it does take a surprisingly long time for anything to happen; and even when it does – it really isn’t particularly interesting – a series of small family-centric melodramatic reveals wrapped inside the equivalent of a romantic comedy of errors lead to an eventual happy ending. This is where the bodice ripper first got its bodice, but there is sadly not as much ripping – even with zombies.

So how does one go about ‘improving’ upon this much-beloved novel written in 1796? Well, to start with, Grahame-Smith changes the underlying tone of the setting from that of Capability Brown landscapes of verdant Britain to one where darkness and evil now encroach upon fortified towns and townsfolk risk life and limb by venturing forth unless heavily armed. Rather than young men enlisted to go and fight Bonaparte, they now attempt to hold back the tide of “unmentionables,” that break free from their graves to attack and devour their fellow countrymen and women who should more wisely spend their days sequestered inside their homes and playing “Coffins and Corpses”.

The intricacies and inter-relationships of the characters can be summed up diagrammatically as follows:

For me, the most enjoyable factor apart from the setting, and that the Bennett sisters were sent to a Shaolin monastery to be trained in the art of mortal combat by an ancient Chinese master (think Kill Bill here), was the new and horrible ways secondary characters, often the most irritating of Austen’s characters, met their grisly ends or comeuppances: William Collins, Charlotte Lucas, and the despicable George Wickham all get what was coming to them – finally.

My advice would be to watch the BBC series adapted by Andrew Davies starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle and then Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. 3/5.