Dracula Raised from His Coffin; Winnie The Pooh Back to 100 Acre Wood

What do Winnie The Pooh, Arthur Dent, James Bond and Dracula have in common?

They've all recently been reprised by other authors and Alison Flood in The Guardian takes a look at the trend of appropriating other authors' characters for sequels. she says :

Such continuations of the work of popular authors, who have inconveniently interrupted their output by dying, are big business for the literary world these days. Authors are being roped in left, right and centre to continue or complete legacies.

I've blogged about Eoin Colfer writing a further installment of The Hichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Sebastian Faulks continuing the James Bond legacy with in Devil May Care.

Dracula is revived from the dead by Dacre Stoker who just happens to be the great grand-nephew of Bram. Dracula: The Un-Dead is published later this month.

There's David Benedictus' Winnie The Pooh revival Return to the Hundred Acre Wood which is released next month.

And then of course there's Tilly Bagshawe Mistress of The Game follow-up to Sidney Sheldon's Master of the Game.

Not surprisingly all those picking up the baton from great writers now deceased admit to a sense of trepidation : reputations are on the line, and no-one wants to follow the original novels with a dud.

Which characters created by a deceased author would you like to see revived in print ... and which modern day author would you choose to do the job?

Postscript :

I twittered the question and got some great replies :

• jerng - "Frankenstein 2100 by Chuck Pahlaniuk, Wuthuring Heights 2100 by Irvine Welsh".
• Umapagan - "Gatsby. By Michael Chabon."
• yrakab - "Ulysses. By me. But very short one." (Suspect this one a bit tongue in cheek lah)

Sequels as Homage

... the urge to write sequels and prequels is almost always an homage of sorts. We don’t want more of books we hate. The books that get re-written and re-imagined are beloved. We don’t want them ever to be over. We pay them the great compliment of imagining that they’re almost real: that there must be more to the story, and that characters we know so well — Elizabeth Bennet, for one, or Sherlock Holmes, who has probably inspired more sequels than any other fictional being — must have more to their lives.

Charles McGrath's essay on literary prequels and sequels entitled The Sincerest Form of Lawsuit Bait is at The New York Times and takes in Austen + Zombies as well as J.D Salinger's injunction to halt the publication of Fredrik Colting's 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye.

McGrath notes that :

... Mr. Colting’s book has ... become a literary cause célèbre, with a number of legal experts, including one from The New York Times, seeking to overturn the judge’s decision. The argument is that the Colting text is “transformative”: that instead of being a mere rip-off, it adds something original and substantive to Mr. Salinger’s version.

Jane Austen's Monster Mash-Ups

First there was the mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and now Quirk Books proudly introduce Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters written by Ben H. Winters, which grafts together classic novel and horror story.

The new novel, say the publishers, will find the Dashwood sisters tossed from their home and sent to an island of man-eating sea creatures. More about it on The New York Times' blog, and enjoy the trailer below :



Other fun mashup titles suggested by readers :

• A Farewell to Arms and Legs
• The Corpse of Monte Cristo
• As I Lay Bleeding
• Android Karenina
• Portrait of a Werewolf as a Young Man
  
• The Brothers Karazombie
• Uncle Tom’s Coffin
• I Know Why the Caged Zombie Sings
• Tender is the Night of the Living Dead
• Lady Chatterley’s Braaaaaains

Any more to add??

Why does Jane Austen have such enduring appeal?

Claire Harman has just published Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, reviewed here by John Sutherland.

Asked for her take on the monster mash-ups of Austen's works, Harman replies in The Australian that :

There is a kind of violent desire to go in there and to mess things up a bit.

A Suitable Sequel

I am so glad I asked Vikram Seth last year at Ubud to write a sequel to A Suitable Boy. I told him that it just wasn't long enough and I wanted more! (And I didn't even resort to any Annie Wilkes like tricks.)

I'm jumping up and down cheering to hear that :

A Suitable Girl will see Lata, the 19-year-old heroine of A Suitable Boy, who suffered the efforts of her mother attempting to find her a suitable husband during the first book, now a grandmother, searching for the right match for her grandson. To be published in the autumn of 2013, publisher Penguin promised that Seth would "bring the action of the narrative up to the present day, encompassing some of the enormous social and economic changes India has undergone in the last 60 years".

Holden Caulfield Stays in Retirement

We've seen before that some authors chose to write a sequel based on an older classic, picking up the characters and taking them off on a new journey.

A Swedish author, Fredrik Colting (writing under the pen name John David California) has written a sequel to J.D. Salinger's 1951 classic The Catcher in the Rye. But it isn't going to be seeing light of day after a judge ruled in favour of Salinger who sued to block publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. Judge Deborah Batts ruled that the main character in was "an infringement" on Salinger's main character, Holden Caulfield.

According to Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times the book features:

... the ultimate alienated teenager, as a lonely old codger who escapes from a retirement home and his beloved younger sister, Phoebe, as a drug addict sinking into dementia.

The Catcher in the Rye has been a staple of the American high school curriculum over the decades although now it seems the younger generation are finding it harder to relate to Caulfield:

What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”

I remember reading it decades back and liking it very much, but can't recall much else about it. I am though at the moment reading Salinger's Nine Stories (a copy of which I inherited from Dina Zaman) and am enjoying it thoroughly. (You can read A Perfect Day for Bananafish here - and lazier so and so's can watch the video here. The story blew me away. )

Salinger is now one of the world's more famous recluses, although he is reportedly still writing every day. Maybe one day ...

The Return of Pooh

Eighty years on, Winnie the Pooh will be returning to Hundred Acre Wood in a sequel to be written by David Benedictus and illustrated by Mark Burgess. The book will be launched in October ... just in time to be a Christmas hit.

I am a great Pooh fan but he wasn't actually part of my childhood since I only discovered him from (less deprived!) friends at secondary school, but even at that advanced age, I was delighted by the books. And especially loved this poem :

The more it snows - tiddly pom
The more it snows - tiddly pom
The more it goes - tiddly pom
The more it goes - tiddly pom
On snowing

And nobody knows - tiddly pom
And nobody knows - tiddly pom
How cold my toes - tiddly pom
How cold my toes - tiddly pom
Are growing.

I was (and am) a simple soul!

Prequels, Sequels and More-quels

There's a time honoured tradition of borrowing characters from someone else's fiction. Even Shakespeare did it! Just take a look at this list.

An article in The Age tells how Sherlock Holmes and Mr. March, the father in Louisa M. Alcott's Little Women are among the latest characters to be given a new lease of life by contemporary writers. Peter Carey is featured in the article (this being an Australian newspaper after all!). He, of course, based his eponymous ('scuse me, but I love that word!) Jack Maggs on Magwitch from Dickens' Great Expectations, and My Life as a Fake is in parts a retelling of the Frankenstein legend.

One of my favourite books of all time is a sequel of sorts and far excels the original in my opinion. The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys is an amazingly sensual and powerful novel which borrows characters from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Mr. Rochester the romantic hero of Bronte's novel is very much the villain of the piece, driving his wife beautiful Creole wife, Antoinette, to madness.



Which fictional character would YOU like to see in a sequel or prequel? I'd love to fill in Captain Corelli's missing years ...