Anne of Green Cables

The mash-up is a big part of contemporary culture, from X-meets-Y high-concept movies to pop music, where samples and guest verses rule the charts, but it’s notable that, save for the burst of popularity enjoyed by Pride and Prejudice and Zombies some 15 years ago, the literary mash-up doesn’t tend to be especially commercially successful – and yet, it still gets written, Jeeves meets Lovecraft, Sherlock Holmes meets the Great War, Star Wars meets Shakespeare, and so on. My suspicion is that part of the explanation is that for an author in a gamesome mood, it’s an exciting challenge to just answer the basic question “can this be made to work?” Getting into the guts of genre and prose style and suturing together two disparate approaches so that the seams don’t show appeals to the Dr. Frankensteinian hubris that lurks within most writers.

On this score, I think Anne of Green Cables can be adjudged a success – with the notable caveat that I’ve never read Anne of Green Gables all the way through. Still, I’m familiar with the basics of the plot and writing style – my wife is a major fan of the books, so I’ve absorbed a lot second-hand – and I skimmed the original as I was playing the game, so I think I’m not totally speaking without foundation when I say that its ventriloquism of L.M. Montgomery in a cyberpunk range comes off.

In the early going, this is because it mostly sticks to a line-by-line retelling of the original, just with the odd bit of sci-fi jargon thrown in: an “intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade ” becomes and “intricate, forgotten bulk of undersea cables in its earlier course, sporadically garlanded with dark fiber splitters and routers,” for example. Sure, the latter excerpt misses some of what’s great in the former – “dark secrets of pool and cascade” is a banger – but the rhythm and sense mostly come through. As the game progresses, though, it gains confidence, and risks more departures from the text. Rather than a simple orphan, in this telling Anne is the ward of a megacorp swallowed up by a hostile acquisition; she’s hired out on a gig contract to the Cuthbert siblings, and while the anachronistic sexism of the original is maintained – they’re disappointed she’s not a boy – she’s got a knack for hacking that lets her work wonders with their glitchy farm equipment.

Notably, while pretty much every incident save the climax is drawn from the book, the amount of recontextualizing varies: some see a near-complete translation of genre tropes, like when a younger sibling laid down by croup is instead rendered insensate by a computer virus. But the infamous raspberry-cordial episode, where Anne accidentally gets a friend drunk, comes through almost entirely intact. This is a good choice because it means that the game isn’t forced to strain for cyberpunk analogues for every little thing, and that the original’s pastoral vibe isn’t totally swallowed up. And the places where the two work in concert are really fun, like the nosy gossip-hound of a neighbor who’s now a vlogger and influencer:

"If Marilla had said that Matthew had gone to Bright River to meet a J-Pop idoru bot Mrs Rachel could not have been more astonished. She was actually piping /dev/null for a solid five seconds. It was unsupposable that Marilla was making fun of her, but as her Bayesian agents suggested, Mrs Rachel was almost forced to suppose it."

Again, it’s clear the best lines are Montgomery’s – this bit, where Anne relates how she and her friends have been writing melodramatic VR-stories, earned me a guffaw (the punch-line is verbatim from Green Gables):

"We made vids of the best ones and sent them to Diana’s aunt Josephine. She messaged back that she had never read anything so amusing in her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died."

But some of the prose that’s wholly new to the game, as far as I can tell, is very very good as well, with Anne’s monologue upon the death of her almost-stepfather particularly affecting:

”I haven’t been alone one minute since it happened—and I want to be. I want to be quite silent and quiet and try to realize it. I know a Matthew who wasn’t dead, and I need to bring that man over the threshold.”

So all told, despite some bumps I think that author-teasing question of “can I?” can be answered with a yes – but for a reader, there’s also the question of “should you?” to be addressed. The point of a mash-up isn’t just to show off virtuosity, after all, but to illuminate something heretofore-unnoticed about the two things being juxtaposed. And here’s where I think Anne of Green Cables begins to struggle. The dour social comment of cyberpunk doesn’t sit all that easily next to a rural Canadian idyll, so what’s the thematic connection the game’s trying to draw?

I think it’s largely meant to be the figure of Anne herself, whose charisma, optimism, and willpower can push through country small-mindedness and megacorp amorality alike. It’s an inspiring idea – especially, let’s acknowledge, in our depressing political circumstances – but it’s one the game hints at rather than fully elucidates. A big issue that blunts the parallel is that most of the plot requires the cyberpunk world to be a reasonably cozy one; while there is one clear bad-guy corp, the other one just seems bumbling, and while the game’s vague about what kind of tech-assisted farming the AvonLea community performs, the environment and people are generally depicted as wholesome. When, at the eleventh hour, a more traditional techbro bad guy sweeps onstage, accompanied by NFT-memes and ChatGPT jokes, the effect is jarring, but worse, the threat he represents also feels like it comes out of nowhere. Anne isn’t showing up how to rebel against a near-overwhelming foe, but simply to dispatch a comic-opera buffoon.

That is, instead of a cyberpunk story featuring Anne Shirley – which I think would be thematically powerful, but much less fun to write and read – what we’ve got here is a romantic bildungsroman with a sci-fi gloss, which is more fun but less coherent. This weighting of the elements extends to the interactive pieces of the game – there are some decision points, but mostly they feel like they don’t lead to much branching and often perceptively offer a choice to either stick to the book-Anne, or do something different, and unsurprisingly book-Anne is more fun. Even combined with an endgame minigame that I still haven’t wrapped my head around, the game-y elements of Anne of Green Cables don’t feel like the major draw.

The major draw, of course, is just Anne herself, and to return to where I started, the success of the game is that she’s as appealing, and inhabiting a world just as inviting, as in the original novel. If the game doesn’t throw a whole new light on an acknowledged classic, that’s entirely forgivable, and if the risk of trying to do so would be weighing Anne down with grimdarkery, a la the Netflix adaptation from a couple year ago that my wife still complains about, it’s even easier to pardon. Having gotten to the end of Anne of Green Cables, I find myself eager to finally read Anne of Green Gables once the Comp ends – and it’s hard to think of a better tribute to the game’s success than that.