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Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain retold from the point of view of runaway slave Jim. Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize.
It seems that retelling classic stories is in vogue. I enjoyed Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys which took the character of Bertha Rochester nee Mason from Jane Eyre and used the change of perspective as a feminist critique. I adored Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead which relocated David Copperfield to Appalachia. She developed a much stronger voice for her protagonist than Dickens had for his and the theme of drug addiction gave her novel urgency.
Similarly, Everett's theme is the despicable crime against humanity that is slavery and the associated denial of human dignity to people of African ancestry. His strategy for highlighting this is to make James and his fellow slaves far more articulate than their stereotypes as found, for example, in Twain's novel. They use the slave patois as a disguise so the white folks don't realise that the slaves are intelligent; this would scare the whites, endangering the slaves. As James says: “Safe movement through the world dependent on mastery of language, fluency.” (1.2)
It's a clever trick. But it seems to be Everett's only trick, apart from the change in perspective from Huck to James. After a while, he seemed to be repeating the same joke in case the reader hadn't cottoned on earlier. Otherwise this is a straightforward novel. Inevitably, given that Twain's original was a picaresque, this one has to be loosely structured which made it feel disorganised. This made some of the resolutions feel coincidental and contrived.
The most interesting part, for me, revolved around Huck's changing relationship with James and how his experiences matured him, leading him to the statement “‘I don't like white folks,’ he said. ‘And I is one.’” (1.5) while still leaving his behaviour warped by the deep-seated subconscious attitudes he had developed through his childhood.
It was an easy read and an entertaining one but somehow it always stayed, for me, as a shadow of Huckleberry Finn rather then blossoming into a work of literature in its own right.
I suspect that the reason I was underwhelmed by a book that others rate so highly is that this is a book that relies for its power on what it says (a perceptive condemnation of slavery and racism) but was less innovative than I had been led to expect in how it said it.
Selected quotes:- “Those boys couldn't sneak up on a blind and deaf man while a band was playing.” (1.1)
- “Religion is just a controlling tool they employ and adhere to when convenient.” (1.2)
- “If’n ya gots to hab a rule to tells ya wha’s good, if’n ya gots to hab good ‘splained to ya, den ya cain’t be good. If’n ya need sum kinds God to tells ya right from wrong, den you won’t never know.” (1.12)
- “Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ‘em.” (1.21)
- “Even in hell, were there such a place, one would know where the fires were just a little cooler, where the rocks were just a little less jagged.” (3.5)
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