The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are the two most famous books in all of American literature. But did you know that there are also two more little known sequels in this series: Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective?
Tom Sawyer Abroad is a bit of a strange addition to the Tom Sawyer canon. The two previous books had been grounded in realism, based primarily on Mark Twain's own real childhood memories (with, admittedly, some things slightly exaggerated for comic effect).
But here, all of a sudden, realism is completely out the window, and Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim are on a fantastic voyage around the world in a magical airship.
Had this book come out in the days of the Internet, I think people would have described it as fanficcy--referring to the type of story that uses familiar established characters in such an outlandish way that it seems like the wild dreams of a adolescent fan, and not the work of a professional writer, who should know better.
...and yet...and yet, at the same time, that's kind of the book's appeal as well. I mean, FanFiction can be kind of fun in it's own way, right? Isn't there a 12-year-old boy inside all of us, who thinks it would be kind of cool to take Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and take them out of small town Missouri and put the on a magical airship and send them over to Africa and the pyramids? Doesn't that sound like an idea so crazy that it just might be fun?
In that respect, the biggest weakness of this book is also its biggest strength. It completely doesn't fit with the tone and style of the two books before it, and yet, if you just let yourself go along with the craziness of it, it can also be a lot of fun.
Evaluation
There are three things you have to be willing to forgive in order to enjoy this book.
First of all, as mentioned above, the realistic universe of the first two books is gone, and we've now entered the fantasy genre.
Secondly, the characters portrayals are inconsistent from the first two books. (I'll detail this more fully below.)
And thirdly, this book is a follow up to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is often considered the best book in all of American literature. So it's got a lot of expectations riding on it, and it doesn't live up to any of them. It's not a bad little book, but it's not even in the same league as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
If you can forgive all that, then you can enjoy this book.
It's not nearly as good as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But then what is? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been called the greatest book in American literature. This book is no where close to that but...
...but it does have its moments. A few laughs here and there, some interesting philosophizing thrown in at points. And best of all, the tone is light, the prose is breezy, and it's very easy to read. It may not be great literature, but for the small amount of effort that is required of the reader, this book is totally worth it.
As with most journey stories, there's not much of a coherent plot. Huck, Tom and Jim encounter something. They move on. They encounter something else.
But the plot is not really the main point of this book. The conversations are the main point. Huck, Jim and Tom keep a running dialogue going all the time they're in the airship, in which they talk about everything from the crusades, to the history of the papacy, to the concept of time zones, to maps, to railroad speculating, to the rules of international diplomacy, to the US government's policy on import duties, et cetera et cetera et cetera.
Basically, the book is a dumping ground for every subject Mark Twain thought would be interesting, whether it's related to the plot or not. So there's a whole chapter on a discussion Huck, Jim, and Tom have about how wonderful fleas are. It has nothing to do with anything in the book that comes before or after it, but Mark Twain was clearly interested in fleas, and thought he could mine the material for some jokes.
And there are a lot of little digressions like that.
Literary criticism is always a favorite subject of Mark Twain--no matter which book he is writing, he always manages to take a few digs at other authors--and this book is no different. Walter Scott (who Mark Twain really hated, and who was consequently a frequent target of Twain) comes in for a few jabs. And a couple of the stories from Arabian Nights get satirized as well.
And then that's pretty much it. The boys encounter a lot of random stuff and have a bunch of silly conversations.
Character Inconsistencies
In terms of story, this book picks up right where The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn left off--the boys return to their hometown, and are reveling in the glory of their adventures down the Mississippi River. Tom Sawyer still has the bullet wound he received at the end of the previous book, and is working the attention for all it's worth. Jim, from the previous book, is also back again and is again a supporting character.
The only big inconsistency, story-wise, is that at the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck Finn had sworn he would never write another book. And yet, Huck Finn is once again the narrator for this volume as well.
(The original Adventures of Tom Sawyer was written in the 3rd person omniscient, but Mark Twain must have decided he liked using Huck Finn as a narrator, because he never returned to the 3rd person omniscient style for the rest of the series--Tom Sawyer Detective, the last book, is also told from Huck's perspective.)
Character-wise, however, these characters have now so completely evolved that there's almost no resemblance to the original Tom and Huck that first appeared in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
So what happened?
As someone who, in my youth, once dabbled in story writing myself, I'm somewhat sympathetic to how difficult it is to keep characters consistent. After all, characters don't exist in objective reality--they exist only in your mind. And your mind is a very fickle thing.
Perhaps somewhere along in the story, you decide to make the character do something that completely changes your image of them, and then in all the subsequent chapters, the character begins evolving along on a path that was completely different from what you had originally imagined. So that by the time you get to chapter 20, the character is now completely different from the character in the first 10 chapters.
I think that's what happened with Mark Twain and the character of Tom Sawyer.
There was an inconsistency about Tom Sawyer's character that goes back all the way to the first book. In the first book, Tom hated school, hated learning, and had no aptitude for it. In geography class, Mark Twain reports that Tom "turned lakes into mountains, mountains into rivers, and rivers into continents" (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, chapter 6).
When Tom was able to trick his Sunday School mates into swapping all their tickets (awarded as prizes for memorizing Bible verses) and tried to cash these tickets in for the prize, the Sunday School Superintendent immediately knew that something was suspicious. "it was simply preposterous that this boy had warehoused two thousand sheaves of scriptural wisdom on his premises--a dozen would strain his capacity, without a doubt" (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, chapter 4). And sure enough, when Tom Sawyer is examined on his Biblical knowledge, he ends up mistaking David and Goliath for two of the disciples of Jesus.
...And yet, even back in the original book, Tom Sawyer had the adventures of Robin Hood completely memorized back to front, so much so that he and Joe Harper could act out the whole book in the woods from memory. And at the end of the book, Tom Sawyer appeared to have a wealth of knowledge about highway robbers that he had learned from reading pulp fiction.
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer becomes even more of a bibliophile. When planning the escape of Jim, it was apparent that Tom Sawyer had read (and committed to memory) vast amounts of pulp fiction about dungeons and prisoners and escaping (including The Man in the Iron Mask).
I thought it was somewhat inconsistent that the boy who had such a short attention span in school and church was now reading so voraciously. But maybe that's just the way boys are in real life? They can never focus on their school assignments, but they can read vast amounts of fantasy/adventure pulp.
Nowadays, when we are living in the post-literate age, where very few people actually sit down and read books anymore, it's even more difficult to imagine Tom Sawyer as a reader. But back in 1840s small town Missouri, what other ways were there for boys to escape into a world of fantasy than to read?
And so, I let it go. It lingered in my mind a bit, but I didn't criticize it as an inconsistency at the time.
By Tom Sawyer Abroad, however, Tom has evolved into a professor of all things literary, historical, scientific, and geographic. At this point, he's so far gone from the original Tom Sawyer that the two aren't even the same character really. For example, when Tom Sawyer was delivering a lecture on Church history in the Middle Ages to Huck and Jim, (Chapter 8) I wrote in the margins: This is funny stuff--but this guy is NOT Tom Sawyer.
Gone also is the superstitious Tom Sawyer from the original book, who used to spend pages and pages trading local superstitions with Huckleberry Finn. Now Tom Sawyer looks down at all superstitions, and is constantly ridiculing everything that Huck and Jim believe.
This is not to say that Tom Sawyer always gets everything right. He still has his weakness, carried over from the first two books, of interpreting romanticized adventure novels as reality, and this is one of the few areas where Huck Finn and Jim are able to show more intelligence than Tom. (Tom Sawyer wants to take Walter Scott's romanticized view of the Crusades as reality, and, later in the book, also wants to believe in the stories of flying horses in Arabian Nights, but in both cases, Huck and Jim are very skeptical of these fantasies.) And Tom Sawyer will also occasionally get his facts muddled, and deliver speeches to Huck and Jim that aren't entirely true.
But for the most part, Tom Sawyer is the authority on all things, and Huck and Jim are the ignoramuses.
Once again, this is inconsistent with the previous books.
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it was Huckleberry Finn who played the expert, and Jim who was the ignoramus. Jim was ignorant about everything about the world, and Huckleberry Finn had to educate him.
Back in that previous book, Huckleberry Finn would also sometimes get his history a little bit mangled. (In an effort to explain to Jim how bad monarchs have always been throughout history, Huck Finn delivers a lecture on the history of the English kings in which several of the kings are chronologically out of order or are assigned to the wrong wives.) It was apparently a favorite gag of Mark Twain that the self-proclaimed expert was not always as smart as he thought he was. And yet, in broad terms, Huck Finn did seem to get the essence of British monarchy correct, even if he mangled the details.
But now, in this book, Huck Finn's previous expertise is taken away, and he is reduced to playing, alongside of Jim, the ignoramus who is completely ignorant of time zones, and geography.
As for Jim, he stays pretty much just like he was in the previous book, except that he has managed to lose most of his redeeming qualities, and is now only a buffoon.
The publisher's introduction in my copy consists pretty much of just one long attack on the literary shortcomings of this book. (An interesting marketing strategy that!) The publisher's introduction made the point that although Jim was portrayed as very ignorant and childlike in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that book was also balanced out by portrayals of Jim as a three dimensional human being, someone with a family, someone with ambitions, and someone with a desire for freedom. In this book, however, the publisher's introduction points out that all of that is gone now, and all that's left is the the ignorant child-like portrayal of Jim. As such, they argue, it is possible to defend The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn against charges of racism, but not possible to defend this book.
Despite Tom Sawyer being more knowledgeable about most things than Huck and Jim, this does not mean that Tom Sawyer is always triumphant in the arguments. Another one of Mark Twain's favorite gags is for the character who has some knowledge about the world to attempt to educate the other characters. The other characters, however, will persist in not understanding, and stubbornly argue against the expert. Often the ignorant character will use better logic than the knowledgeable character, and so the argument will end with the ignorant character winning the argument.
This gag also was used several times in the previous book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However in that book, it was Huckleberry Finn who was knowledgeable about the world, and Jim who was ignorant. Now the dynamics are switched around, Huck Finn has become stupider, and Huck and Jim are now both on the same side.
Other Notes
* For a well-written intelligent review of this book from someone else: SEE HERE.
* I've seen this book called steampunk (W) in a number of different places, and I'm of general agreement with that designation. (Although if you wanted to get technical, I think the word steampunk is supposed to refer to a modern story that imagines backwards towards the age of Victorian era science fiction. I'm not sure the original science fiction actually written during the Victorian era qualifies).
Another technicality is that the airship isn't actually powered by steam, but by some mysterious substance much more powerful than steam. As the mad professor exclaims: "Nobody knows the secret but me! Nobody knows what makes it move but me--and it's a new power! A new power, and a thousand times the strongest in the earth. Steam's foolishness to it." (from chapter 2)
(Mark Twain uses the narrative cheat common to all science fiction writers who don't understand science--just allude to some new technological invention and never explain it.)
* I’ve also seen in a couple different places the claim that this book is meant to be a parody of Jules Verne style adventure novels like Around the World in 80 Days. However, having read Around the World in 80 Days, I’ve got to say I don’t see it. Aside from the fact that both books involve travelling around the world, there's no specific parodying going on of either Jules Verne's writing style or his plot points (that I could see.) Besides which, Around the World in 80 Days is itself a kind of parody of an adventure novel.
* While I'm nitpicking character inconsistencies, here's another one that got me.
The conclusion of the book revolves around Tom Sawyer losing his corn-cob pipe, and being so attached to his smoking habit that he has to send Huck and Jim back to get another corn cob pipe for him.
In the original The Adventures of Tom Sawyer book, however, Tom Sawyer gets sick when he and Joe Harper try to imitate Huck's habit of smoking tobacco from corn cob pipes.
* In the beginning of this book, Tom Sawyer is looked upon as a hero by the local townspeople because he traveled a few towns down the Mississippi.
This part, at least, is something that is consistent with the other books. In the first Tom Sawyer book, Mark Twain reports that the local schoolboys are amazed to meet Judge Thatcher, who "was from Constantinople, twelve miles away--so he had traveled and seen the world--these very eyes had looked upon the County Court House, which was said to have a tin roof. The awe which these reflections inspired was attested by the impressive silence of staring eyes." (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, chapter 4).
Probably Mark Twain is exaggerating slightly for comic effect, but it makes sense. Back then, travel was difficult and took many months. And you couldn't just leave the farm for a couple weeks to go on vacation. So I imagine Mark Twain is not exaggerating by much here when he describes the awe in which these small town people regarded anyone who had traveled around the state.
Just think of how much things have changed these days!
Other Notes from the Publisher's Introduction:
* The Publisher's Introduction notes the irony that this book was published in 1894--right around the same time Mark Twain wrote his famous essay "Fennimore Cooper's Literary Offenses". The Publisher notes the irony of Mark Twain criticizing Fennimore for his lack of realism, while at the same time writing this book, which contains several plot points that Twain "wouldn't have forgiven Cooper.." (Publisher's Introduction, Wordsworth Classics).
* Also from the publisher's introduction comes the information that the sole reason that Mark Twain wrote this book was to escape from financial troubles.
Like most people, when reading the classics I save the publisher's introduction for last in order to avoid all the spoilers. (Why they don't just put those things in the back of the book, where they belong, is beyond me, but that's another rant for another post.) So while I was actually reading this book, I had no idea. But I can't say I was surprised to find out. It explains the huge difference in literary quality between this book and the previous books in the Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn series.
This book is less about Mark Twain trying to preserve his place in the literary canon than it is about him just trying to make a quick buck out of his most marketable characters.
*In the first chapter, Tom Sawyer attempts to enlist Huck and Jim on his plan to go on a crusade to take back the Holy Land. But Huck and Jim don't share his enthusiasm for it.
I [Huck Finn--the narrator] studied over it, but couldn't seem to git at the rights of it no way. I says, "It's too many for me, Tom Sawyer. If I had a farm, and it was mine, and another person wanted it, would it be right for him to--."
"Oh, shucks! You don't know enough to come in when it rains, Huck Finn. It ain't a farm, it's entirely different. You see, it's like this. They own the land, just the mere land, and that's all they do own; but it was our folk, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven't any business to be there defiling it. It's a shame, and we oughtn't to stand it a minute. We ought to march against them and take it away from them."
I can't help but feel that this passage (which was meant to be satirical back when it was first written in 1894) has taken on a new significance since 1948.
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