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Boekverslag Through the looking glass (Lewis Carroll)

Boekverslag 25 Mei 1997. Gemaakt door Walter ter Maten, Son en Breugel.

Author:	Lewis Carroll (real name: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)
Title:	Through the looking glass, 1872.
Publisher:	Penguin Books Ltd., England, 1981.
Pages:	153.
Genre:	Fantasy.

Summary:

This book is a sequel to 'Alice in Wonderland'. This time the stories are based on meeting the pieces of the chessboard. After passing the looking glass Alice enters a garden and becomes a white pawn. Her task is to travel through seven fields to the opposite and become a queen (In chess-terms: Alice plays and wins in eleven moves). The garden is the board of chess.
The first one she meets is the Red Queen. This one moves fast and is irritable: she always knows things that are stranger than other people do know. When she moves the environment remains the same. (This is a strange form of Virtual Reality.) The first trip as pawn is by train after which strange insects are met with funny names (bread-and-butterfly).
The next meeting is with the twin (castles) Tweedledee and Tweedledum who are well-known from a poem: 'Tweedledee and Tweedledum agreed to have a battle.' (this also finally happens), but after the coming of the crow 'which frightened the heroes, so they quite forgot there quarrel'. The battle is funny because both castles are of the same color. T & T like long poems, for instance that of 'the walrus and the carpenter', who finally eat their companions, the oysters.
T & T warn her not to wake up the Red King, who is dreaming in the wood. How do you know that you are not part of his dream? What will happen to you when he wakes up? This is an interesting question concerning another level of existence. [That Alice really is in danger you can see when you consider the positions of Alice and of the Red King on the board of chess below]
The White Queen she next meets, is a silly one with a shawl. Alice has a talk about yesterday, today and tomorrow, and living backwards in time (what happens to the kings messenger who is in jail, but whose trial is on next Wednesday).
Then Alice finds herself in a shop with the sheep. In a while the shop turns into a stream where the banks (like the things earlier on the shelves) are flowing. This is a story about rowing.
After this Alice meets Humpty Dumpty (also a castle), who is egg-shaped ('HD sat on a wall, HD had a great fall'). Is his belt a real one or is it his collar? He doesn't know what a math-subtraction is, but Alice proudly does (LC was teacher in Maths). However HD is very good in the meaning of words: he explains much of the strange words of the Jabberwocky poem (where sounds of different words are mixed).
In the story of the fight for the crown between the unicorn and the lion two strange Anglo-Saxon messengers are met, Haigha and Hatta: one to come, and one to go with the messages. They resemble (by behaviour, but also by the pictures) the famous mad pair met before in Alice in Wonderland: the March Hare and the Hatter. As in the other book they drink tea and there is a problem in manners, like distributing properly the cake.
In the wood Alice meets a Red and a White Knight who fight according to strange Rules of Battle (Just like in the real chess game). They are also very poor riders. At the end the White Knight recites a long poem (a ballad).
Finally Alice enters the eighth square and becomes a Queen after passing a proper examination. One part deals with Math things like addition, subtraction, and division. The questions are strange: what remains after subtracting a bone from a dog? (Bone and dog will go, but the dog will loose his temper.) After this strange questions on language and time are asked. Of course also strange literal meanings of sentences, like 'who is answering the door?' appear (meeting with the frog).
At the dinner party rules of etiquette are important: you don't cut a piece of meal after you have been introduced to it. When Alice stands up for the final words of thanks she grows again and creates chaos. Then she awakes. One of the Queens in her hand appears to be one of here young kittens.

The persons:
White	White	Red	Red
Pieces	Pawns	Pawns	Pieces
Tweedledee	Daisy	Daisy	Humpty Dumpty
Unicorn	Haigha	Messenger	Carpenter
Sheep	Oyster	Oyster	Walrus
W.Queen	`Lily'/Alice	Tiger-lily	R.Queen
W.King	Fawn	Rose	R.King
Aged man	Oyster	Oyster	Crow
W.Knight	Hatta	Frog	R.Knight
Tweedledum	Daisy	Daisy	Lion

The old English way to denote a move on the chessboard:

Each color numbered the fields per column from 1 (at his side) to 8 (at the opposite side). It looks strange, but it makes notation symmetrical.
The columns are named after the pieces: QR (Queens Rook), QKt (Queens Knight), QB (Queens Bishop), Q (Queen), K (King), KB (Kings Bishop), KKt (Kings Knight), KR (Kings Rook).
The position KR4 for red is the same position as KR5 for white
A `W.Q.' means a White Queen, etc.

White Pawn (Alice) to play, and wins in eleven moves (cf. the chessboard)
1. Alice (A.) meets R.Q.	1. R.Q. to KR4 (running)
2. A. through Q3 (by railway), and A. to Q4 (Tdum & Tdee) Luckily the R.K. is sleeping.	2. W.Q. to QB4 (running with shawl)
3. A. meets W.Q.	3. W.Q. to QB5 (becomes sheep)
4. A. to Q5 (shop, river, shop)	4. W.Q. to KB8 (leaves egg on shelf)
5. A. to Q6 (Humpty Dumpty)	5. W.Q. to QB8 (flying from R.KKt)
6. A. to Q7 (forest)	6. R.KKt . to K2 (chess)
7. W.KKt. takes R.KKt (battle)	7. W.KKt to KB5 (orig. position)
8. A. to Q8 (coronation)	8. R.Q. to K1 (examination) The relative positions are: W.Q., A., R.Q.
9. A. becomes Queen	9. Queens castle
10. A. castles (feast)	10. W.Q. to QR6 (soup)
11. A. takes R.Q. and wins by making chess!

Remarks

Note that the white party makes several subsequent moves, which is against the rules of chess.
When Alice makes finally chess, she awakes the dreaming Red King. Indeed the world (game and story) ends, leaving the question posed earlier: was she part of his dreams?

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