Book Review: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
November 11th, 2009 Filed under: Reviews - Books by admin
Book Review – Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters
Quirk Books
While Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the follow-up to 2009’s wildly popular and nerdalicious Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, seems on the surface to simply be a thinly-veiled attempt by a publishing company to cash in on a classic piece of public domain literature, which it totally is, that does not change in any way the fact that it is quite the literary triumph.
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters follows the basic plot of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, which of course you, dear reader, have wisely avoided due to its horrific boringness. It chronicles the trials and tribulations of the female members of the Dashwood family (the mother Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret) in Regency-era England as they are deprived of the comfortable life promised to them with the dying breath of the late Mr. Dashwood by Mr. Dashwood’s son from a previous marriage, Mr. John Dashwood, and his vulturesque wife Fanny.
The ladies Dashwood eventually come to reside with a distant relative, Sir John Middleton, as well as his wife and family and the various members of his social circle who live near the Dashwoods’ small home on Pestilent Isle, off the Devonshire coast. Intrigue, as one can imagine, swirls constantly as the girls face the assails of love, loss, rejection, betrayal, and adventure. The only difference, really, between Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and the original is that it takes place in an alternate reality where the world is overrun by fucking sea monsters bent on destroying the human race. Writer Ben H. Winters weaves plot points such as The Devonshire Fang-Beast, Sub-Marine Station Beta, and giant hyper-intelligent lobsters together so seamlessly with whatever tedious crap was in the original that one has a hard time telling his additions apart from the initial prose.
Amid the churning chaos of the Alteration, as the characters refer to their monster-filled state of affairs, the youthful, pretty Marianne is courted by both the swashbuckling Willoughby and the facially deformed Colonel Brandon. At the same time the elder, prudent Elinor tries to figure out the meaning of her relationship with the shy, awkward Edward Ferrars as all the while the ominous secrets of the Alteration and Pestilent Isle slowly rear their ugly heads. In an age where originality seems to be dwindling faster than our supply of oil and naturally-breasted porn stars, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters combines violence, gore, and dark humour with Austen’s beautiful (if wearing) writing in a way that while not truly original at least tries and comes pretty close.
By A.W. Reid
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