My History With This
Book
This was my favorite book as a
child. Even though I never actually read
it.
Like a lot
of my early exposure to the classics, I only encountered this book in abridged and
simplified versions.
Seeing that
I was hungry for more, my parents bought me other versions of the story. I had a couple different versions of Treasure Island
around the house, but all of them abridged.
My dad
bought me a VHS copy of the 1950 Disney movie of
Treasure Island (
W), and a few years later
when the TNT
Treasure Island television
movie
(
W) came out, I also
recorded that off the TV.
Both movie
versions I also watched and re-watched many times over. I was also obsessed with
Return to Treasure Island (
W), which used to be re-run on the Disney channel, and which I watched over and over again.
However,
the original text—the unabridged Robert Louis Stevenson book—was always a struggle
for me.
My school
had a copy of Treasure
Island in its library, and when I was in first and second
grade I checked the book out several times.
It was a hard read for a 6 or 7 year old. I could understand most of it, and if I had
had the perseverance I could have struggled through to the end, but it was more
work than it was enjoyment, and I always gave up after a few chapters.
The fact that
I already knew the story, and was just trying to read the original for the sake
of a few extra details, also made the book more work than pleasure.
And yet, after a few months, I would go back to the library, check the book out again,
and start all over from the beginning to try to finally finish it. (I always had to re-start the book from the
beginning every time. For some reason,
it never occurred to me to just try and pick off from where I left off last
time. In a sign that I was already very
anal retentive even as a young boy, I thought that when you read a book you
always had to go from the beginning to the end.)
The
farthest I ever got into the original book was when Jim sneaks back aboard the Hispaniola. For anyone not acquainted with the story,
this is about 3/4th of the way through the book, and I was almost finished with
the story. But I gave up there, and left
the book unfinished.
(To be fair
to myself, this was a difficult read for a 7 year old. Especially all the nautical terminology and
descriptions were a bit much for a mid-western boy who had never even seen the
ocean. For example from chapter 25: “I had scarce gained a position on the
bowspirit, when the flying jib flapped and filled upon the other tack, with a
report like a gun. The schooner trembled
to her keel under the reverse; but the next moment, the other sails still
drawing, the jib flapped back again, and hung idle. This had nearly tossed me off into the sea;
and now I lost no time, crawled back along the bowspirit, and tumbled head
foremost on the deck. I was on the lee
side of the forecastle, and the mainsail, which was still drawing, concealed
from me a certain portion of the after-deck. Not a soul was to be seen. The
planks, which had not been swabbed since the mutiny, bore the print of many
feet; and an empty bottle, broken by the neck, tumbled to and fro like a live
thing in the scuppers. Suddenly the Hispaniola came right into the wind. The jibs behind me cracked aloud; the rubber
slammed to; the whole ship gave a sickening heave and shudder, and at the same
moment the main-boom swung inboard, the sheet groaning in the blocks, and
showed me the lee after deck.” …et cetera )
And after
that, I gave up on Treasure
Island. (After having
nearly finished the book, I just didn’t have it in me to start all the way from
the beginning again.)
I moved on
to other Robert Louis Stevenson books instead.
Around 3rd
grade, I read
Kidnapped (
W) (a book I became interested in after having seen the Disney movie
(
W).)
Kidnapped I actually did manage to read
to the end, although it was also more work than pleasure at the time, and I
didn’t understand many parts of it.
Around 5th
grade, I tried to read
Black Arrow
(
W), but also found it hard work, and lost interest in it half-way
through.
I ended up
concluding that I liked Robert Louis Stevenson’s ideas a lot better than I
liked his prose, and decided to leave it at that.
Why I Returned to This
Book Now
It’s always kind of bugged me that
I never read to the end of
Treasure Island.
And, having mentioned
Treasure
Island in a
couple of
posts recently, I decided that
if I was going to go around calling
Treasure
Island one of my favorite books, the least I could do was to read it all
the way through.
At the age
of 35, this book no longer intimidates me the way it did when I was 6. And when I was going on a holiday recently, I
thought this would be the perfect kind of light-reading to throw in my
backpack.
Why I’m Reviewing
This Book
Normally I
only use this
book review project for new reads, and not for books
that I’ve re-read.
This book
is borderline, because only the last 75 pages was being read for the first
time.
But
actually, even for the first 3/4s of the book, even though I had once upon a
time read it before, after 30 years it had mostly faded in the memory, and I
was probably due to re-read it anyway.
(I think my memory must be better suited to spoken words rather than written,
because the fisher-price audio tape that accompanied the comic book version of Treasure Island I still remarkably well
all these years later. But Robert Louis
Stevenson’s original words were largely forgotten.)
The Review
First of all, as for the prose and
readability, add Robert Louis Stevenson to
the -
long -
list -
of -
authors -
with whom I
struggled as a child, but who I now find remarkably easy and enjoyable as an
adult.
I read the whole book in two days.
I found it an absolute pleasure from start to
finish.
Exactly
what age is the perfect age for this book I’m not sure. Especially since all children mature at
different rates. (No doubt there are
people out there who could read and enjoy this book at a much earlier age than
me.) And I also suspect popular writing styles
may have changed slightly over time, perhaps making this book less accessible
to children than when it was first published in 1883. But nowadays I’d probably put the ideal
reader for this book at about 13 or 14. (Feel free to disagree with me.)
As for the
story:
Right,
well, if you read my lengthy pre-amble above, you know I’m obviously not
approaching this book from the perspective of a blank-slate. And I have enough childhood nostalgia for
this story which makes it difficult to review it objectively. (I mean, all reviews are subjective anyway,
but….)
The story of
pirates on a mysterious tropical island immediately returns to memory all the
feelings of exotic adventure I had reading this book as a child.
Also the
pirates are forever frozen in my memory as terrifying boogie-men, almost like mythical
monsters.
Had this
story been completely new to me, how I would have reacted as an adult? I can’t say.
But,
although my opinion may be biased by nostalgia, I still consider this book one
of the greatest adventure stories of all time.
As for the
characters:
The
characterization is uneven.
Most of the
good-guys are barely defined, and easily forgettable.
Many of them are never developed beyond a
name, and exist solely for the purpose of dying at key battles.
If this were
Star Trek, they would be wearing red shirts.
(As a
child, I had always been slightly confused by the characters Alan, Tom, Joyce,
Hunter, Redruth and Gray? Who were these
people? They popped up in the story, but
I had no idea who they were. I had
always thought that this was because I hadn’t read the full unabridged version,
and that if I read the full story from start to finish than all the characters
would be fully fleshed out. But now I know it’s just as bad in the original.)
Even the
major characters, Doctor Livesey, Squire Trelawney, and Captain Smollett are
barely defined beyond a couple identifiable characteristics.
The main
character and narrator, Jim Hawkins, is mostly just a blank slate. His main purpose is to serve as a generic boy
for young boy readers to vicariously experience the adventure through. There’s shockingly little description of his
family life. His father dies early on in
the book, but it’s barely even mentioned.
But it’s
not that Robert Louis Stevenson can’t do interesting characters when he wants
to. It’s more that, as is often said of
Milton, all the interesting characterization goes to the devils. The pirates are the real stars of this story,
and Stevenson makes them larger than life.
Billy
Bones, the first pirate that Jim Hawkins meets, is very colorful. Jim isn’t sure whether to be terrified of
him, or feel sorry for him, and this ambivalence is passed onto the
reader. We know he’s being hunted down
for something, but at the same time we can see how fierce and terrifying he is.
Blind Pew and
Black Dog, the pirates who come looking for Billy Bones, are even more
frightening.
Long John
Silver is the most interesting of the pirates.
He can be just as frightening as the other pirates, and we see him
murder several times in cold blood. (One
of the book’s most chilling scenes is when Tom becomes unnerved by someone’s
death screams, and Long John Silver casually informs him that it’s the sound of
Alan being murdered.)
But what’s
unique about Silver is that he can also be very good at appearing friendly and
turning on the charm when he wants to.
We see
Silver charm several people throughout the book, including Jim.
It’s always
a source of uncertainty to Jim (and hence to the reader as well) whether Silver
genuinely likes him, or whether he’s just being manipulative for his own
ends. This question is never answered
when Silver disappears at the end of the book.
Had there ever been any good in him, or had he just really good at
playing everyone?
One of the
most interesting things about this book is the back story. The story of what happened to Captain Flint
and the lost treasure is only revealed gradually. (Captain Flint, although he was dead before
the story even begins, is really one of the major characters in the book. His spirit seems to haunt the whole story, so
it’s no surprise that the pirates readily believe they are hearing his ghost at
the end.)
Just as
Greek myths always reference the heroes and monsters of old, there’s a sense running
through Treasure
Island that everyone regards the old days of Captain Flint as
a kind of pirate mythology. And this
adds to the mystic of the book.
Other Notes
* The inspiration
for
King Solomon’s Mines was apparently
that H. Rider Haggard read
Treasure Island, and was inspired to try and create a
similar adventure novel.
But in my
opinion,
King Solomon’s Mines
is nowhere near the same class as
Treasure Island.
* According to Wikipedia (
W), J.M. Barrie was good
friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, and so connected the story of
Treasure Island with his own novel
Peter Pan.
In one section of the book, Captain Hook is
aware of Captain Flint, and Long-John Silver (who Hook refers to as Barbecue,
which was Silver’s nickname among the pirates).
