Before even beginning to delve into this modern masterpiece, I have to come right out and admit that Pride and Prejudice, in its pure, original form as written solely by Jane Austen, might honestly be one of my favorite books. This is a snotty claim and to sufficiently address it, I’m going to need to get a little literary, a little historical even. Please accept my apologies and bear with me.

Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is in many respects formulaic, arguably the literary equivalent of a chick flick. It concerns love, meeting men and ends (as Shakespeare taught us all good comedies do) with a marriage. But there’s the thing. People seem to forget that Jane Austen’s semi repetitive Victorian love stories came out of a society that basically disliked fiction as a medium. The novel wasn’t yet understood to possess the same artistic or academic merit (read: snobbery) that it holds in this day and age. It was seen as a waste of time, a distraction from more worthwhile forms of study. I don’t know that it would be fair to equate it to how people speak dismissively of television, but I’m going to. During the 16th and 17th centuries, it was basically considered immoral to tell an untrue story; fiction was decried as something base, deceptive even, except where it explicitly taught a lesson of morality. It was difficult to get a straight fiction story published. To cite an example, Daniel Defoe had to claim his book Moll Flanders, the story of a thief and prostitute, was biographical in nature in order to get it published. And though Austen wrote and published her stories nearly a century later, she still came from a fairly prudish tradition, one that abhorred the art she chose to create.

The appeal of the original story lies principally in it’s characters, most specifically (for me at least) in that they are sort of irregular for a Victorian novel. They aren’t polished or perfect. The two main characters of the story, Mark Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, are basically backwards socially; they don’t seem to fit in and they don’t especially aspire to. They don’t like to party. They like to read. Before you dismiss this, consider that Pride and Prejudice was written and published years before anything the Bronte sisters cooked up, before James Joyce and even before Dickens. While Austen is clearly not the only author to have told the love stories of intellectual outcasts, she certainly had a hand in the conception of this notion and arguably in its proliferation in later English literature.

Isn’t that likable? Don’t you find yourself warming to Jane Austen?

“Smith has taken something that Austen had in satin gloves and a matching ball gown and he has made it into a red eyed, blood covered, staggering mess. Subtly.”

Beyond that, Darcey is just such an asshole. And not in that self loathing, semi poetic Byronic hero manner of Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights), Rochester (Jane Eyre) or the bildunsroman self reflective shit that all Dicken’s heroes seem prone to. Most of these misanthropic characters have good reasons for bemoaning their fate. But not Darcy. No. Darcy doesn’t hold with that crap. He’s just a goddamn asshole all day. There’s utterly no reason for it. He has had the right up bringing, the right friends, an estate, a name, a family, a fortune. But whatever. He’s just a dick, usually for no ostensible reason. In the overly polished polite pages of a Jane Austen novel, where everything is dresses, balls and propriety, a reader really comes to appreciate some needlessly being an asshole. It’s pretty cool.

Elizabeth too. She doesn’t achieve the same level of self serving jerkdom, but she is pretty obnoxious and judgemental. Though, it is a bit easier to see why she’s so pissed off all the time. All those goddamn sisters.

This, for me at least, is the immense appeal of Pride and Prejudice. Two characters who don’t give a shit about all that annoying crap the book takes such pains to illustrate for us. A love story about two perpetually unromantic, sort of pissed off people. Awesome. It even appeals to our mid twenties notions of irony, our hipster predilections for that different thing that everybody’s doing.

Even if you can’t all that excited about people needlessly being jerkoffs, the tale’s chock full of cool themes, my favorites of which seems to be that of the individual versus society, or intellect versus artifice. We note this dichotemy most clearly in the frivolous social niceities Mrs. Bennet and her younger daughters exhibit, as opposed to those of Darcey, Mr. Bennet and Elizabeth, who seem altogether caught up in intellectual pursuits.

Jane Austen is saying significant things about how people should be raised, that Elizabeth’s love of reading may suggest an almost propaganda like encouragement from the author of a novel. Elizabeth, Darcy, Mr. Bennet all exist as characters who don’t care for the artifice of socializing and propriety, the suggestion being that there is little room for the intellectual types in popular culture, that society doesn’t encourage the proliferation of the intelligence. This kind of thing makes lit geeks like me pretty excited. But we understand if it doesn’t necessarily do it for the rest of you. Now….what could bridge this gap? What could make these thematic dualities accessible, applicable and perhaps most importantly, intriguing in this modern world?

BAM! Zombies. Oh and ninjas. You wouldn’t have known just from the title/cover that this book is also about ninjas….but it is. Hence the adage of old about judging books by their covers.

It sounds stupid. And truthfully it is just a little stupid. But it also…. isn’t.

There’s something a tiny bit clever about what Seth Grahame-Smith has done here. I’m not sure how intentional this is and I will admit that he’s accomplished this almost entirely through narrative/story telling negligence, i.e. by leaving the structure and even the themes of Austen’s original story completely intact. Who would have thought one could covertly add zombies and ninjas into a classical work of literature, into a Victorian love story, no less? The themes and fabric of the narrative remain shockingly the same, with the the unimaginably subtle interweaving of zombies and ninjas. A form and function combination arguably. Were zombies to suddenly infiltrate society, it would probably be a bit as it happens in the book, subtle and then suddenly they’re just everywhere and then just as suddenly, they are gone.

To find the brilliance in Smith’s alternation, it’s necessary to get a little literary again. Symbolically zombies, the living dead as it were, are intended to represent the masses, are meant to suggest us as a population, a group of people blindly staggering through life, disaffected, unaware, consuming each other mindlessly. Again, the loss of the individual, consumed by the masses. The notion of zombies is horrifying. These are monsters that come not from the dark lagoon, not from deep space. They are literally us, our neighbors, friends, and family. We are ultimately what consumes us. Dreadful, no?

The suggestion is of conforming, of something so big and almost social that it will eventually rise up and over whelm all individuals who oppose it. Smith has taken something that Austen had in satin gloves and a matching ball gown and he has made it into a red eyed, blood covered, staggering mess. Subtly.

It is worth noting that those characters who are outcasts in Austen’s original book are the most “successful” against the zombies (again signifying the death of individualism and the all consuming artifice of society). Mr. Bennet, Darcey and Elizabeth all demonstrate disinterest in balls, courtship and proper behavior and are simply obsessed with cultivating their ninja/anti-zombie skills. Meanwhile, it is worth noting one of the more symbolic alterations Smith has visited on the story, that of Charlotte. In the book, Charlotte is a dear friend of Elizabeth’s who winds up marrying a gentlemen who Elizabeth boldly rejected. This particular gentleman is probably one of the most socially obsessed characters in the story. He is a clergy man for a great, important lady and can speak of little else, demonstrating his reliance on an almost obsolete system of patronage especially consider the post apolocolytic zombie ridden universe he lives in. When Charlotte accepts this man and his mundane conformist viewpoint and proposal, she also reveals (to Elizabeth in confidence) that she has been bitten by a zombie. We see Charlotte literally become a zombie after she accepts the proposal and life of this stupid man, a man who’s life and lack of individualism Elizabeth rejected.

So what do we have? We have a pretty clear cut connection between zombies and the “silly” society obsessed characters who live only for other’s opinions of them. We have a connection between our ninja heros and the intellectuals outcasts, those who live for themselves and who we respect for that. But is there a point to it? Why put zombies in a Jane Austen novel? Can that mean anything?

Smith is achieving something subtle with his book and I think he does it very well. Is it possible that by imposing zombies on one of the great academic books of a bygone era, Smith is suggesting that intellectualism and by proxy academia need to make a little room for popular culture? That in this day and age and in these deeply irreverent times, it might just be possible for us elitist intellectuals to come down off our high literary horses and talk about zombies? Could irreverence, comedy and reappropriation be the ultimate resistance to a modern apathy that threatens to make zombies out of all of us?

I’m not totally sure. But I’m sure excited.