The Prince and the Pauper – Mark Twain

On October 14, 2020September 27, 2020 By nymithIn 1000 Good Books List, Adventure, American writers, Children's Classics, Historical Fiction, Set in England, Set in EuropeLeave a comment

It derailed the Great American Novel and it was totally worth it.

https://postercrazed.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/The-Prince-and-the-Pauper-by-Mark-Twain-Art-Print.jpg — Not my edition, but importing photos has gotten rather difficult lately…

Title: The Prince and the Pauper
Author: Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Illustrator: Uncredited
Original Publication Date: 1881
Edition: Harper and Brothers Publishers (1909), 281 pages
Genre: Historical fiction. Adventure.
Ages: 10-14
First Sentence: In the ancient city of London on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.

As King Henry VIII’s health fails, a fateful meeting takes place between his son and heir, Edward VII, and a pauper named Tom Canty. The boys switch costume, marveling at their strangely identical appearance, but before they can change back, they are mistaken one for the other and Prince Edward is thrown from the palace on his ear while Tom is installed in his place. Edward must now venture through the underbelly of Tudor society, seeking someone to believe his claims, while Tom futilely insists that he is not the true heir to a court that can only maintain that the prince has gone mad. When King Henry dies, preparations for the coronation begin, but how will the prince ever regain his rightful place?

Mark Twain revolutionized American literature with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its groundbreaking use of wholly accurate and authentic vernacular. His characters spoke in slightly different dialects depending on their location, class and race. He took far greater pains with the writing than he did with the plot, and it shows in his lazy sequels, where the accent work turns plain and inconsistent. However, in every one of those books he had an advantage: he was an American who’d grown up and spent years traveling and working in the south. While he visited England, it was clearly not long enough to learn anything about the overwhelming variety of accents to be found there. Everyone in The Prince and the Pauper speaks an identical version of ye olde English. Here’s the prince begging the pauper’s villainous father to believe that he is not Tom Canty:

“Oh, art his father, truly? Sweet heaven grant it be so–then wilt thou fetch him away and restore me!”
“His father? I know not what thou mean’st; I but know I am thy father, as thou shalt soon have cause to–“
“Oh, jest not, palter not, delay not!–I am worn, I am wounded, I can bear no more. Take me to the king my father, and he will make thee rich beyond thy wildest dreams. Believe me, man, believe me!–I speak no lie, but only the truth!–put forth thy hand and save me! I am indeed the Prince of Wales!”

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/onceuponatime8042/images/e/e0/InfoboxPrincePauper.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20130414052811 — The illustrations from my edition, shamefully uncredited.

Neither of the titular characters indulge in a second’s worth of masquerade. They both stand by their true identities, and yet the boy from Offal Court with only his feet for transport and the sequestered son of the King of England apparently speak as identically as they look. No Englishman would have written this plot (or if he did, he would choose an “exotic” locale like Ruritania to set it in). Twain grounds his flight of fancy amidst real historical events, but I don’t even want to criticize him for this. The Tom Sawyer books were not exactly bastions of realism either, and The Prince and the Pauper departs altogether into the realms of the fairy tale – a style which Twain does a great job with.

As a fairy tale, it’s properly dark, suited for those children who’ve grown up with Grimm, Andersen and other storytellers of good cruelly set upon before it can triumph. Twain’s inspiration seems to have stemmed in part from a desire to draw attention to the excessive punishments of the Tudor era, and as such his prince finds himself lost amid beggars, thieves and vagrants. What’s odd is that, unlike in the Tom Sawyer series, Twain wears his heart on his sleeve here, appearing in genuine earnest upon his subject. He offers few bon mots, but some of his loveliest writing, as when the prince (now king) finds shelter in a barn and friendship with a calf.

The king was not only delighted to find that the creature was only a calf, but delighted to have the calf’s company; for he had been feeling so lonesome and friendless that the company and comradeship of even this humble animal was welcome. And he had been so buffeted, so rudely entreated by his own kind, that it was a real comfort to him to feel that he was at last in the soiciety of a fellow-creature that had at least a soft heart and a gentle spirit, whatever loftier attributes might be lacking. So he resolved to waive rank and make friends with the calf.
…
Pleasant thoughts came at once; life took on a cheerfuler seeming. He was free of the bonds of servitude and crime, free of the companionship of base and brutal outlaws; he was warm, he was sheltered; in a word, he was happy. The night wind was rising; it swept by in fitful gusts that made the old barn quake and rattle, then its forces died down at intervals, and went moaning and wailing around corners and projections–but it was all music to the king, now that he was snug and comfortable; let it blow and rage, let it batter and bang, let it moan and wail, he minded it not, he only enjoyed it. He merely snuggled the closer to his friend, in a luxury of warm contentment, and drifted blissfully out of consciousness into a deep and dreamless sleep that was full of serenity and peace. The distant dogs howled, the melancholy kine complained, and the winds went on raging, whilst furious sheets of rain drove along the roof; but the majesty of England slept on undisturbed, and the calf did the same, it being a simply creature and not easily troubled by storms or embarrassed by sleeping with a king.

Twain uses an interesting tactic for the historical aspects included – where his interest in description flags, he simply excerpts from other chroniclers such as Leigh Hunt; educating his public while saving time. I guess that never caught on. It does disrupt the story a little bit, but it adds plenty of detail, especially of the resplendent pickle Tom Canty’s in.

Tom’s plotline is given less space, which is fitting since it’s considerably less dramatic. Unlike the Tom Sawyer books, whose plotting range from ramshackle to insane, The Prince and the Pauper is tightly woven. Tom Canty remains stationary, and the looming false coronation provides a natural venue for the finale, devoid of excessive coincidence.

https://christinawehner.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/527px-the_prince_and_the_pauper_12-134.jpg

Most of the secondary characters are only there to help or hinder the two boys, with the exception of Miles Hendon, a brave musketeer-styled nobleman who was wrongfully dispossessed and seeks restoration. Miles sees the good qualities in what he takes for a delusional beggar-boy, and so offers his protection. Although unconvinced by Edward’s assertions, Miles plays along, hoping to cure the boy of his madness and make him his ward. To this end, Miles becomes “a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows” as the unlikely pair brave the mean streets of Tudor England together, and when separated, always find each other again.

The young prince does turn out to be every bit the equal of Miles for bravery. I had assumed going in that Edward would be the lesser of the two boys, stuck-up and ready for humbling, but he is so wholly principled and virtuous that Twain accidentally makes a case for monarchy through his example. Obviously, the plot couldn’t begin without the pair being rather dimwitted, but once the prince is cast into the streets things really get into gear. As Tom Canty’s abusive father and grandmother drag the prince “home” for a beating, the boy’s mother attempts to intervene and the prince’s mettle is revealed for the first time:

A sounding blow upon the prince’s shoulder from Canty’s broad palm sent him staggering into goodwife Canty’s arms, who clasped him to her breast, and sheltered him from a pelting rain of cuffs and slaps by interposing her own person.
The prince sprung away from Mrs. Canty, exclaiming:
“Thou shalt not suffer for me, madam. Let these swine do their will upon me alone.”
This speech infuriated the swine to such a degree that they set about their work without waste of time.

From this time forward, the prince shows loyalty to those as give him aid, compassion for the unjustly punished, contempt for the base and crooked, and obstinence in the face of disbelief. Trained in the art of the sword, he makes short work of boy thieves, and when captured by a gang of hoodlums, he refuses to improve his position by assisting in their plots to beg and steal.

Tom Canty is less sure of his moral compass. With less to lose, he finds himself going along with the masquerade he’s been forced into. He doesn’t like it but he adapts. Even here, the theme of justice asserts itself when Tom presides over a passing sheriff’s prisoners, bringing them into the palace to decide their fates. This culminates in some of the only comedic material in what is, for Twain, a thoroughly dramatic tale. Tom hears the accusation of witchcraft and storm-summoning levied against a mother and daughter:

“How wrought they, to bring the storm?”
“By pulling off their stockings, sire.”
This astonished Tom, and also fired his curiosity to fever heat. He said, eagerly:
“It is wonderful! Hath it always this dread effect?”
“Always, my liege–at least if the woman desire it, and utter the needful words, either in her mind or with her tongue.”
Tom turned to the woman, and said with impetuous zeal:
“Exert thy power–I would see a storm!”
There was a sudden paling of cheeks in the superstitious assemblage, and a general, though unexpressed, desire to get out of the place–all of which was lost upon Tom, who was dead to everything but the proposed cataclysm.

https://tobagostars.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/mark-twain.jpg

I could continue pulling quotes from this book all day, and I can well understand why Twain found this story more compelling than Huckleberry Finn. Throughout The Prince and the Pauper it seems as if he actually likes his characters – which I’m not sure can be said about any of his sequels to Tom Sawyer. Because it’s still written by Twain, there are occasional moments where his snideness gets the better of him, as when, after describing the engineering marvel of London Bridge and its remarkably self-sufficient community, he caps off with this statement: It was just the sort of population to be narrow and ignorant and self-conceited. However, that aspect of his writing is kept on a short leash here and not allowed to sprawl in every direction. The writing is wonderful, the plot is entertaining and though parts of it are very intense, that is compensated by the ever-present ideal of goodness. It is an undoubted children’s classic.

Stormy, Misty’s Foal – Marguerite Henry

On August 1, 2020July 12, 2020 By nymithIn Adventure, American writers, Animal Stories, Horse Stories, Read Alouds, Set in Virginia, Survival StoriesLeave a comment

This second sequel is a great improvement on Sea Star and makes so little reference to the events of that book that it could even be read as the first sequel to Misty – which nine year old me believed it to be, thanks to the Aladdin boxset.

stormy Title: Stormy, Misty’s Foal (Misty #3)
Author: Marguerite Henry
Illustrator: Wesley Dennis
Original Publication Date: 1963
Edition: Aladdin Paperbacks (1991), 223 pages
Genre: Animal Stories. Survival stories.
Ages: 8-12
First Line: In the gigantic Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Virginia, a sliver of land lies exposed to the smile of the sun and the fury of wind and tide.

Misty has been home with the Beebes for an indeterminate amount of time and is now ready to have her first foal. Paul and Maureen are excited and impatient, but a violent storm strikes the islands, causing massive tidal flooding and forcing the locals to evacuate. Animals can’t come on the helicopters, so the Beebes have to move Misty into their kitchen and hope for the best. Will Misty and her colt survive? Will the Beebes have a home to return to? And how can the islands ever recover from such terrible devastation?

Stormy, Misty’s Foal is a much darker novel than Misty or Sea Star, death-riddled from the sixth chapter (when a neighbor reports on two thousand drowned baby chicks), onward through the storm and into its aftermath, in which Paul and Grandpa Beebe are enlisted to scour the islands and place markers wherever dead ponies are found. It’s a sequel meant for older kids, with a greater suspense and dread, and it stands on its own identity rather than the laurels of what came before.

cat and dog, wesley dennis — Happy dog, less happy cat.

Being considerably longer than the first two Beebe books, Marguerite Henry is able to place more focus on the location, with Pony Ranch clearly defined as a going concern. There are more details surrounding such things as church visits and the contents of the Beebe’s smokehouse, along with a family cat and dog. Misty is referred to as a “movie star,” and she’s obviously made the family prosperous, but there’s no indication in the text that she was ever gone, which makes it feel like Sea Star never happened.

Again, Henry contradicts a passage in her earlier work, preventing the three books from coming together as an integral whole. From Sea Star: “Look at me, Sea Star,” [Paul] said. “When Misty comes back home, you and she can be a team. Misty and Star. Sound pretty to you? And you can run like birds together and you can raise up foals of your own, and Maureen and I can race you both and we won’t care which wins.” It’s a pretty passage and was a high point of that book, yet Sea Star doesn’t appear or get mentioned here. The reason is probably that the true story had an unhappy ending – orphan foals are hard to keep alive, and the Beebe’s efforts were in vain – but after writing such a positive tale, Henry disappoints any children hoping to see Misty and Star together by silently sticking to the facts.

Grandpa Beebe, wesley dennis — Grandpa Beebe worries over his life’s work.

There are a host of positives that come with this third story, though. Chiefly among them is a real sense of the Beebe family as an ensemble cast. Therefore, Paul is no longer the only really proactive character; everyone has a job to do when the disaster strikes, and they each have their own fears to quell. Grandpa Beebe is particularly changed by this process into a man in his own right rather than the wise authority figure of previous books.

Misty spends much of her time separated from the Beebes, as their symbol of home, history and everything they wish to return to (with Stormy embodying hope for the future). Given this is based off of the Ash Wednesday storm of 1962, it’s clear that Henry is again playing loose with the facts – the real Clarence and Paul Beebe had both sadly died in the intervening decade and a different branch of the family was living at Pony Ranch and caring for Misty during this time. However, the extensive credits at the end of the book make it clear that Henry was determined to do right by the islanders and what they endured. She consulted everyone from the family to the mayor to the coast guard, giving Stormy‘s evacuation and cleanup scenes clarity and definition.

A street sign veered by, narrowly missing the horses’ knees. 98th Street, it said. Grandpa turned around to make sure he had read it aright. “My soul and body!” he boomed. “It scun clear down from Ocean City! That’s thirty mile away!”
…
In front of Barrett’s Grocery two red gas pumps were being used as mooring posts for skiffs and smacks and trawlers. A Coast Guard DUKW, called a “duck,” and looking like a cross between a jeep and a boat, came churning up alongside Grandpa and Paul.
…
As they turned onto Main Street, which runs along the very shore of the bay, Paul was stunned. Yesterday the wide street with its white houses and stores and oyster-shucking sheds had been neat and prime, like a Grandma Moses picture. Today boats were on the loose, bashing into houses. A forty-footer had rammed right through one house, its bow sticking out the back door, its stern out the front.
Nothing was sacred to the sea. It swept into the cemetery, lifted up coffins, cast them into peoples’ front yards.

flood destruction, wesley dennis — Flood destruction.

Stormy works just as well as the earlier volumes for reading aloud, and in this case parents might actually find the plot more gripping than their children, who would most likely focus on the ponies and the missing dog while parents would immediately grasp the larger nature of the disaster.

Of course, it isn’t all grim – there’s a great deal of focus on the community supporting one another and on the brave men in the Coast Guard and local volunteers setting forth into the floodlands, by boat and helicopter, providing aid and rescue. Also, the various book covers don’t exactly keep you in suspense about whether Misty safely delivers her foal or not.

Spoilers for the final chapters below.

Misty and Stormy end up on tour, raising money to restore the depleted herds of Assateague. Because we’ve seen the devastation close up, this tour to help the ecology and economy of Chincoteague comes across as truly heartwarming (unlike the previous college-for-Clarence plot), and it does help a lot that the Beebes don’t sell her off this time.

End of Spoilers.

One bit of advice I’d give is that no matter how many of the Misty books you decide to add to your library, avoid the Aladdin editions pictured at the top of these reviews. The Aladdin books are clearly cheap reprints and Wesley Dennis’s marvelous illustrations lose a great deal of definition in the process.

See Also: Misty of Chincoteague and Sea Star.

Parental Guide!

surviving ponies, wesley dennis — Surviving ponies.

Violence: A great deal. Many animals die in the flood, either drowned or exposed to the elements. Much of the time this is only mentioned in passing, but when Paul and Grandpa finally make it out to their ponies’ winter pasture they find an entire herd dead, and proceed to make a grim search for survivors. The heart-breaking work went on. They came upon snakes floating, and rabbits and rats. And they found more stallions dead, with their mares and colts nearby. And they found lone stragglers caught and tethered fast by twining vines. Grandpa is hit especially hard by this loss.

However, none of the main animal characters die and there are no human casualties at all, so depending on what your own child has already read, this might be very easy to handle. I remember finding it extremely disturbing when I first read it, but a year or so later this became my favorite Misty book.

Values: Faith, hope and charity all get their due, along with love of home and family, some grassroots philanthropy and community pulling together in hard times. The civic emphasis of the previous volumes (obey your elders and sacrifice for college) is replaced by civil disobedience. The Mayor has trouble with the mainland government after the storm:

“The government has approved sending ‘copters to take fresh water to the ponies still alive on Assateague, but they have no orders yet to take out the dead ones.”
Grandpa exploded. “Mayor! The live ones has got water. There’s allus water in the high-up pools in the White Hills. Them ponies know it.”
“You and I know it too, Clarence. But sometimes outside people get sentimental in the wrong places.”

This theme continues when the government refuses to allow women and children to return to Chincoteague, with Grandpa deciding to just smuggle his family home.

Perception of government isn’t the only thing that changed between the 40s and 60s. The role of women had too, and Grandma, a positive and respected figure before, is now singled out for pity at various points for having to always be at home or supporting the Ladies’ Auxiliary. As for Maureen…

Role Models: Maureen is now actively complaining about being a girl. As Maureen and Grandma heaped the trays and carried them back, Maureen’s lip quivered. “Oh, Grandma, Paul didn’t even ask what I did today. He doesn’t even know I was at Doctor Finney’s, riding a famous trotter. Oh, Grandma, why was I born a girl?” This is right after Paul and Grandpa come back from scouting for dead ponies, both so stricken by the sight that they can’t even talk about it, and she’s whining because she was spared all that and got to play with living ponies instead. She spends much of this book bursting into tears. “Oh, Grandma, being a girl is horrible. Paul always gets to have the most excitement.”

She’s acting as if trawling the death-choked waters is fun and games, and that’s not to mention that Paul only gets to accompany his grandfather on these forays back to the islands because he’s getting near full-grown, and the Coast Guard needs able-bodied men to do these jobs. Maureen is a pre-teen girl. She comes off far worse here than she ever did back in the 40s, precisely because Henry is trying to make her more outspoken – chafing at restrictions while ignoring that those restrictions are perfectly logical in this situation. The author never has any of her characters sit down and talk to Maureen about her attitude, and the girl is now a terrible role model, even though the others all remain admirable.

Educational Properties: Storms and flooding are serious concerns in coastal communities, and Stormy covers many aspects of such crises, from the creation of tidal storms to which citizens are most vulnerable when the power goes out (there’s a subplot involving a man who lives in an “electric cradle”). The details of evacuation, clean up and recovery mean that a lot of research and discussion could take place around this book, whether or not such a scenario could happen where you live. Obviously, massive amounts of natural science could also be tied in with Stormy, and there are also some random bonuses – like the reference to Grandma Moses and a world news report on the radio which is a time capsule in and of itself.

End of Guide.

I highly recommend Stormy, Misty’s Foal. It could foster some great conversations, and it’s full of drama without feeling lopsided the way Sea Star did. At this point, it seemed that Marguerite Henry had said all she needed to about Misty’s life, but Misty had three foals in all and Henry kept tabs on the descendants of her former pet and muse, eventually resulting in one final book about an especially gifted descendant: Misty’s Twilight. Expect my review next month.

Up Next: An odd little book by William McCleery, brought back in print by the NYRB Children’s Collection.

The Midnight Fox – Betsy Byars

On July 25, 2020July 19, 2020 By nymithIn Adventure, American writers, Animal Stories, Coming-of-Age Stories, Fox Stories, Read Alouds, Realistic FictionLeave a comment

It turns out that my first choice for Betsy Byars was her own favorite among her many books. For those who are also wondering where to begin with Byars, this is quite a good choice.

Putting the finishing touches on this review, I discovered that both she and her illustrator have passed away this year – a clear loss to children’s literature.

midnight fox cover, byars Title: The Midnight Fox
Author: Betsy Byars (1928-2020)
Illustrator: Ann Grifalconi (1929-2020)
Original Publication Date: 1968
Edition: Puffin Books (1981), 159 pages
Genre: Realistic Fiction. Animal stories.
Ages: 8-12
First Line: Sometimes at night when the rain is beating against the windows of my room, I think about that summer on the farm.

The summer before Tom turns ten, his parents send him to stay with his Aunt Millie, Uncle Fred and cousin Hazeline for a couple of months while they embark on a cycling tour of Europe. Tom is dismayed – as a comfortable city boy he’s sure to be miserable on Fred and Millie’s farm. He’s scared of animals and he misses his best friend Petie Burkis every day. Things change for the better when he catches a glimpse of an elusive black fox, but foxes are not welcome animals on a farm…

The Midnight Fox lacks a shiny award sticker on the cover and so I figured the fox’s chance of living to the end of the book was actually fairly high, although Byars got me second-guessing myself several times before it was finished – if your main concern in animal stories is whether the headlining critter lives or dies, please skip to the Violence section of the Parental Guide below.

While the fox plotline creates drama and suspense, the bulk of The Midnight Fox is a quiet and introspective portrait of a lonely nine year old boy on a depressing vacation – comparisons to my previous Castle read, Junonia (a quiet and introspective portrait of a lonely nine year old girl on a depressing vacation), are inevitable. So how does the vintage choice stand up?

Two of the most notable differences between Betsy Byars and Kevin Henkes are that Byars makes use of humour throughout her book and she allows her child protagonist to have actual interests. Henkes focused completely on the emotions of his heroine Alice, while her life back home, friends or any hobbies outside of shell collecting were barely acknowledged. She got “books” for her birthday; Tom actually reads:

I would go over to Petie’s and he would be sitting on the porch reading. He would be so interested in the book that he wouldn’t even look up to see who I was.
“What are you reading, Petie?”
He would lift the book so I could see the title and it would be something like Mystery of the Deep.
“Can I read it when you’re through?”
He would nod.
“How much more you got?”
Still without missing a word, he would flip the remaining pages.
“Well, hurry up, will you?”
He would nod again, but Petie Burkis had never hurried through a book in his life. So I would wait. And wait. And finally, when I was ready to go out and get the book out of the library myself, then he would come over and give it to me.

Tom has an endearing range of hobbies besides, whether inventing games with Petie, building models, daydreaming or watching the kind of movies that show on “Chiller Theater.” He has a quirky and boyish view of the world which buoys up what would otherwise be a fairly dour and strait-laced narrative. He certainly has a melancholic disposition, but he isn’t depressed. Of course, faulting Henkes for depicting pre-teen depression would be unfair – it was all but unknown in the 60s, and seems to be everywhere today. So in spite of their many similarities, The Midnight Fox and Junonia are closer to apples and oranges than they appear. After all, realistic fiction is framed by the limits of reality – if reality is that pre-teen depression is skyrocketing and many kids are hemmed in by loneliness, anxiety and obsessively structured playtime, novels like The Midnight Fox aren’t going to be written anymore. However, this ensures that Byars is by far the more entertaining choice in this instance.

fox sighting — Ann Grifalconi gives a distinctive look to the story.

One of her best tricks within this novel is to keep Tom’s best friend Petie a presence throughout the book, mentioned with great frequency – true friendships matter even if they have no bearing on the plot. Much of the novel’s accompanying humour comes from Tom’s anecdotes of Petie, alongside his self-deprecating image of what a ridiculous figure he makes on the farm:

I continued to walk until I came out of the forest, right by the pasture where the cows were grazing. They were all together in the shade of the trees, and they turned in a body and looked at me.
I had thought, when I first saw these cows from a distance, that if I ever had to do a circus act, I would get about six cows like these and train them. They would be called The Cow Family Dancers, and I would come out in an Alpine suit with an accordion, and as I would start to play, the cows would come dancing out into the circus arena, not trotting like horses, but doing peasant steps, turning and clicking their heels and tossing their heads.
Now that I saw the cows at close range I abandoned this idea for all time and began to walk slowly past them. “Cows do not attack people. Cows do not attack people. Cows do not attack people,” I said to myself as I passed, and then, completely against my will, I found myself making up a Petie Burkis news story:
COW ATTACKS BOY–SCIENTISTS BAFFLED
Scientists in Clinton County were baffled today by the report that a cow attacked a young boy. The young boy, who was passing the cow in a respectful manner, was able to give no reason for the attack. “She just came at me,” he managed to whisper before he was driven to the hospital. No one has been able to reach the parents of the young boy, as they are having a vacation in Europe.

fox and kit — Grifalconi’s stylized foxes.

A positive change comes over Tom after he catches a glimpse of the black fox, hunting for her sole surviving kit. At first he’s certain that he only dreamed it, not knowing that foxes could even come in black, and afterwards he takes an interest in fox habitat and hunting patterns, forging a link through this new rural hobby with nature, gaining the ability to hold still and really look at the world around him. His terror of domestic animals is replaced by a fascination with wildlife, and he becomes calmer and braver because of it. This is a fairly standard character progression in children’s literature, probably because of how true it is, and it works very well here:

I had found a hornets’ nest like a huge gray shield in a tree. I had found a bird’s nest, low in a bush, with five pale-blue eggs and no mother to hatch them. I had found seven places where chipmunks lived. I had found a brown owl who never moved from one certain limb of one certain tree. I had heard a tree, split by lightning years ago, suddenly topple and crash to the ground, and I ran and got there in time to see a disgruntled possum run down the broken tree and into the woods. But I did not find the place where the black fox lived.

Byars has an enjoyable writing style, a bit rambling but oddly graceful. Her writing advice was to always read your own prose out loud and that pays dividends here. The Midnight Fox does not suffer from any dry prose and it is personal and character-driven while still being amusing. The story is sure to please nature-loving kids, especially if they’ve already enjoyed other vintage options.

See Also: Junonia by Kevin Henkes. Same issues, different generation.

Parental Guide has only one important spoiler. Does the fox live?

Violence: Tom’s cousin Hazeline reluctantly talks about a recent incident with a farmer, a poultry farm and a family of foxes:

“…underneath the moss was an open trap, and that very night the fox came by and he saw the raw chicken and he put his foot right on that moss and sprung the trap. Bingo!”
“Oh.”
“End of fox,” she said. “That was about two weeks ago, and then he found the den and went and got a stick of dynamite and blew it up and that was the end of the baby foxes.”
“Oh.” It was one of those stories that you’re sorry afterward that you made somebody tell you.

There is some real pathos to the separation of the foxes, with the mother fox trying to bring food to the cage her kit is kept in. Animal lovers will be relieved that they survive.

Values: Hunting is not shown in a positive light, although Byars never turns this into a polemic. Tom does not attack or condemn his uncle, nor does he judge his aunt for wanting her poultry protected – he just doesn’t want the foxes to die and so he makes a stand.

Role Models: Tom is a worrier from the start, but he’s well-behaved and tries to keep his petulance under wraps. He’s creative and observant, self-contained and self-aware. In the end, he gets the classic coming-of-age moment of conquering his fears to save something that matters to him.

Tom’s finds his relatives very hard to relate to, but they aren’t villains. Uncle Fred’s understated response to Tom’s defiance is quite heartwarming, the more so since this is not a sentimental story.

Educational Properties: Certainly there’s a fair amount of discussion on the life cycle of the fox, which would tie this to a nature study. With its extremely small cast and limited setting, The Midnight Fox would also be a good choice for mapping out a novel.

End of Guide.

This was an unexpectedly enjoyable book and I shall certainly be keeping an eye out for more Betsy Byars. She went on from this to win a Newbery, an Edgar and the National Book Award and her books regularly appear in used bookstores (or they did before 2020 happened, anyway).

Up Next: Returning to the ongoing saga of Misty of Chincoteague.

The Magic Snow Bird and Other Stories – Enid Blyton

On December 23, 2019June 9, 2020 By nymithIn Adventure, British writers, Fairies, the Fair Folk and Little People, Fantasy Fiction, Set in England, Short Story CollectionLeave a comment

Charlotte Mason would have called this twaddle, and she’d have been right. However, twaddle is a necessary step on the road to literacy and Blyton’s contributions, seen in this sampling of her posthumous Popular Rewards short story anthologies, are so clean you can practically hear the squeak. These days, that’s refreshing.

Title: The Magic Snow Bird and Other Stories
Author: Enid Blyton (1897-1968)
Illustrator: Dorothy Hamilton (1906-)
Original Publication Date: 1989
Edition: Award Publications (1990), 192 pages
Genre: Short stories. Fantasy. Anthropomorphic fantasy. Realistic fiction.
Ages: 4-7
First Line: Once upon a time, Derry the dormouse hid a nice little store of cherry-stones in the hole of a hollow tree.

If you happened upon this particular volume out of a Blyton bibliography consisting of hundreds of books, you would find 19 stories inside of a durable hardback printed in the German Democratic Republic, with large type, plentiful illustrations and what appears to be surprisingly low-acid paper. The stories are taken in part from a 1951 collection with the same name while the rest possibly date from the same era. Of the stories, 13 are fantasy tales, 4 are realistic tales of little British children at play and 2 are anthropomorphic stories of field and farm animals. The shortest selections are 4 pages long, while the longest, ‘Bobbo’s Magic Stocking,’ runs to 50. There is a slight Christmas theme at work, in that the title story and ‘Bobbo’ both involve trips to the North Pole to visit Santa’s Workshop – however, the rest of the material lacks a proper winter theme and appears to be selected mostly for variety.

The book is trite, just as one would suspect given the cover art. The writing is simple and fond of exclamation points: How all the others laughed! Funny old Thomas–wouldn’t go out into the water with his brothers and sisters, but didn’t think twice about going up to his chin for his boat! The illustrations are not exactly subtle. The pixies sport names like Littlefeet and Scatterbrain. And yet, none of that matters because The Magic Snow Bird (and I suspect many other Blyton works) are absolutely perfect for early readers.

The stories each stand alone and are equipped with simple plots, light comedy and wholesome messages. Three basic topics are covered:

snow bird, blyton, hamilton — Snow bird and cargo.

1. Stories meant purely to delight. Fairy treats such as the titular snow bird, which takes two children to visit Santa, or a magic blackberry which grows into a whole pie. Others ignore magic and involve simple visits from wildlife, such as the story of a dormouse who decides to hibernate in a little girl’s dollhouse. These are all low-stakes adventures based on ideas that children would enjoy.

2. “Just so stories.” Blyton’s whimsical answers to questions like how holly got its spines and why the blackbird’s beak is yellow. “A pixie did it” appears to be a favorite answer.

3. Cautionary tales. Stories of foolish or naughty children learning the error of their ways, such as Bobbo, the greedy materialist who sneaks aboard the annual good children’s trip to the North Pole because elves don’t know how to do head counts. Blyton changes up the standard Santa mythology regarding such questions as how the reindeer fly:

Bobbo looked, and he saw a most enormous hill stretching up in front of the sleigh. It was very, very steep, but the reindeer leapt up it as easily as if it was level ground. The sleigh tilted backwards, and the children held on more tightly than ever. Up and up went the sleigh, right to the very, very top, and then, on the summit, drenched in moonlight, it stopped.
‘We’ve come to a little inn!’ cried one of the children, leaning out. ‘Oh, and here come six little gnomes, carrying something! What are they going to do?’
All the children leaned out to watch. They saw the gnomes come hurrying up, carrying pairs of lovely green wings. There were six pairs of these, and the gnomes knew just what to do with them.
Four of the gnomes went to the reindeer, and fastened a pair of wings on to their backs. The other two bent down by the sleigh, and the children saw that they had fastened two pairs of wings on to the sides of the sleigh as well!

cat, blyton, hamilton — Dormouse and interested neighbour.

For all that the writing is simplistic, I actually enjoyed Blyton’s imagery quite a bit. Her stories are of the halcyon 1950s and utterly reject anything approaching relevance even for the time period. Her children play hide and seek, sail toy boats and have dollhouses. Her families are automatically intact and her reference pool consists of pixies, brownies and gnomes alongside classic British plants like holly and primroses. It’s simple escapism, something for the child graduating from I Can Read books to chapter books, completely clean-cut and cuddly. I suspect Blyton was consistent in this regard – series like Malory Towers might be aimed at an older group of kids than these anthologies, but I highly doubt the content takes any darker shifts.

Now here’s where things get interesting, as librarians and educators have been waging a war against Enid Blyton for the past 50 years. It’s almost funny, given how innocuous a target she appears, and I suspect a large part of their continued bitterness against Blyton stems from the fact that she won. Her books are still massively popular, such that British publisher Hachette’s attempt to doctor the Famous Five books hurt sales so badly that they actually returned to their earlier edition in 2016. Educators and librarians fume but Blyton remains standing. Used bookstores in Britain feature whole shelves stuffed with her books (which I’ve seen firsthand) and there she stays, not on the strength of one canonized classic so much as her whole output.

Normally I would be inclined to sympathize with critics taking a stand against poor prose – however, these critics sit mute over much of the modern dross saturating the markets while insisting that bad old Blyton should be quashed. As such I suspect the “literary standards” argument was simply a handy cudgel in this instance, with the real objection being Blyton’s perpetual popularity. These heartlessly conservative and blindingly white books are still widely read today, while successive Carnegie winners and acclaimed intersectional efforts lapse into obscurity. The so-called experts have failed to turn public opinion against her for over 50 years. That’s gotta sting.

https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320495328l/7095563.jpg — The bait-and-switch winner of 2010, perhaps?

To best illustrate why I so warmly recommend Blyton, have a quick look at the GoodReads reviews for The Very Little Princess, a Stepping Stones chapter book by Newbery Honor author Marion Dane Bauer. With its quaint title, sweet pink cover and Blytonian premise of a doll coming to life, what could possibly go wrong? Surely any parent could gift this to their daughter in full confidence and leave it at that! Yet this book ends with its young heroine being abandoned by her bipolar mother at her grandmother’s house – a grandmother she’d never met before. The packaging thus appears deeply subversive – bypassing parents and cutting them out of the conversation they should be having (and deciding when to have) with their children about such topics. And it’s not the first, the worst or the last of this trend.

For a cautious parent, researching every book you pick up for your child is an overwhelming task, which leads us back to Blyton. With her, you’re off the hook. Children love her and parents can relax around her. Oh, the horror!

Check out the Parental Guide and see what I mean.

Violence: In one story, a duckling is angry at the mean ducks on the farm and so he goes to the farmer demanding that all the ducks be killed. Mr. Farmer laughs and tells him to come back in eight weeks, since he might change his mind by then – a bit of folktaleish cynicism on display here, though it’s obvious the farmer does not intend to follow through with the duckling’s idea. The duckling is ridiculed as a fool for wishing harm on his own while seeing himself as exempt.

No other stories go near the concept of death. There are some references to scary goblins, but they never actually appear.

Values: Blyton likes to tell her audience not to be idiots. Don’t be greedy. Don’t make assumptions. Don’t lose your temper. Don’t bite your nails. Don’t be like that duckling. Meanwhile, her good children are always helpful, generous and provide shelter for local wildlife.

Role Models: Naughty children learn the error of their ways. Good children visit Santa.

Educational Properties: A fine option for reading practice.

https://www.egmont.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/enid-blyton.jpg — Enid Blyton and dog.

As I said, this book is being recommended on faith as a stand-in for much of Blyton’s work, as the odds of finding specific titles here in America seem small. She’s not great literature – and she doesn’t have to be. She gave children stories they loved.

Up Next: A wintry children’s classic and Dutch travelogue all rolled up in one for the Christmas season: Mary Mapes Dodge.

Misty of Chincoteague – Marguerite Henry

On December 9, 2019May 21, 2020 By nymithIn 1000 Good Books List, Adventure, American writers, Animal Stories, Children's Classics, Horse Stories, Read Alouds, Set in Virginia1 Comment

Remember when you could buy a pony for 100 dollars? Me neither.

Related image Title: Misty of Chincoteague (Misty #1)
Author: Marguerite Henry (1902-1997)
Illustrator: Wesley Dennis (1903-1966)
Original Publication Date: 1947
Edition: Aladdin Paperbacks (1991), 174 pages
Genre: Animal Stories. Adventure.
Ages: 5-11
First Line: A wild, ringing neigh shrilled up from the hold of the Spanish galleon.

Paul and Maureen Beebe are growing up on their grandparent’s horse farm in the isolated commuity of Chincoteague Island. Tired of bonding with colts that always get sold, the siblings set out to earn 100 dollars to spend at the annual Pony Penning Day, when the wild herds on Assateague Island are rounded up and the colts auctioned. Paul and Maureen have their hearts set on an elusive mare called the Phantom, who has avoided capture two years in a row. Faced with the challenges of earning enough money, capturing and gentling her, an added complication is thrown into the mix when Pony Penning Day arrives and reveals that this year the Phantom has a colt of her own…

The Newbery list is certainly hit-and-miss but (with a few notable exceptions like The Phantom Tollbooth and Little House on the Prairie) they have historically been quite good at recognising children’s classics when they appear on the American stage and that’s exactly what the 1948 Honor Book Misty of Chincoteague is. A horse story that can appeal to a broad age range, full of action and purpose as the protagonists dedicate themselves to a series of goals, yet devoid of the emotional punches that are found in other famous horse books like Black Beauty. The ending is memorable and wistful, but without tragedy, and the story as a whole is sunny, lacking any villains beyond circumstances that must be overcome. With Paul and Maureen sharing viewpoints, it even has equal appeal to boys as well as girls, something that has become unusual in the genre.

Wesley Dennis — Paul heading off to work.

Marguerite Henry instills her book with a strong sense of place right from the start, not only with the wild herds on Assateague but also the fishing community of Chincoteague, whose independence forms a parallel to the ponies, for these men and women are also making do with less, cut off from the larger nation yet thriving. There’s a real American ethos within the book and it captures a place in time with its own culture and cuisine (there’s a small pile of food descriptions with oysters, cornbread, clam fritters, dumplings and wild blackberry jam). Henry spent a great deal of time on Chincoteague, and even though she changed the larger “true story” drastically, I have no reason to distrust her eye for detail, which even renders the old-timers’ accent through Grandpa and Grandma Beebe:

Maureen: “…if you came here to Pony Ranch to buy a colt, would you choose one that was gentled or would you choose a wild one?”
Grandpa chuckled. “Can’t you jes’ see yer Grandma crow-hoppin’ along on a wild colt!”
“Thar’s yer answer,” laughed Grandma, as she cut golden squares of cornbread. “I’d take the mannerly colt.”

The real draw are the horses, of course, and Henry supplies two perfect equine characters in the Phantom and Misty. The Phantom has a map of the United States on her withers – a clear cut case of symbolism in a patriotic novel. “Lad,” [Grandpa] said, “the Phantom don’t wear that white map on her withers for nothing. It stands for Liberty, and ain’t no human being going to take her liberty away from her. … The Phantom ain’t a hoss. She ain’t even a lady. She’s just a piece of wind and sky.”

https://78.media.tumblr.com/a995b367ed67762425a704e360e5c91e/tumblr_oigdbozsVX1tedwcmo7_500.jpg — Paul’s first glimpse of the Phantom and Misty.

The only thing that really tames the Phantom is her “colt” (islanders in this book refer to every young horse as a colt, which I thought only referred to males), whom Paul names Misty. Misty drives none of the plot – she is the counterweight to the Phantom’s wildness, playful and domestic by nature, belonging to Chincoteague from the moment her hooves land on the shore. Slowly and dejectedly the wild ponies paraded through the main streets of Chincoteague. Only the Phantom’s colt seemed happy with her lot.

I would be remiss not to single out Wesley Dennis as a large part of Misty of Chncoteague‘s charm, as he always supplies the perfect image for every scene. The personalities of every character, horse and human, shine through and equal the best of Garth Williams’ work. Dennis draws comic characters without caricaturing and his equines emote without crossing the line and losing their realism. His dramatic talents also enhance the impact of what is a fairly short and low-stakes adventure tale, making the risks feel bigger and the triumphs sweeter. Nicely done.

https://thehaynesblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/il_fullxfull-291177439.jpg — Maureen surrounded by wild ponies – a brief line of text given epic treatment.

I have no complaints to make. Misty of Chincoteague was quite nearly as enjoyable today as it was when I was a child. It makes a lovely addition to the family bookshelf and would make a good read-aloud for high summer, maybe even for 4th of July week given how civic minded the story is. For more on the 1940s value system this is steeped in, check out the Parental Guide below.

Violence: The book opens with a Spanish shipwreck in which the original Assateague ponies, destined for the mines of Peru, successfully swim to shore. All hands perish in the storm, with Henry softening that blow by depicting the Captain as gold-hungry and indifferent to the ponies’ welfare. In the present day, there’s a high ratio of distressed ponies, due to their captivity on Pony Penning Day and the auction. None are injured or die.

Values: Hard work and responsibility as Paul and Maureen seize any type of summer employment they can find to earn money for the Phantom – and then do it all over again to pay for Misty. They have a whole series of chores round the Ranch and almost every time the grandparents are depicted they are in the middle of work, whether that be feeding chickens, preparing food, maintaining the horses or doing laundry.

Misty is very patriotic in tone – Pony Penning revenue goes toward maintaining the island’s fire department, school is “what me and Grandma pays taxes for,” every roundup man is well-known by his day job and the island is a well oiled machine with every man, woman and child doing their part to keep it running. The kids have a great deal of independence and are allowed their own goals and their own time to tell about them, but once Paul is picked for the roundup crew he is expected to obey his leader’s orders (and is promptly rewarded when following instructions leads him to the Phantom). There’s even material about fair play, as Paul and Maureen pull a wishbone to decide who gets to race the Phantom, and liberty, when Paul makes a hard decision about the Phantom’s future.

Role Models: Paul has a keen head for business but also a romantic streak, and he’s the one most attuned to the Phantom. Maureen is given less to do, which disappointed me growing up, and a friend of mine found several disparaging remarks (such as “Quit acting like a girl, Maureen!”) concerning as a parent. As such, I paid close attention to the topic and found the only source of the quotes to be Paul, which could easily be attributed to big brother posturing. Such occasional put-downs never stop him from treating her as an equal partner in their plan to buy and gentle the Phantom and the actual text never devalues Maureen’s (or Grandma Beebe’s) contributions. It’s certainly true that she doesn’t get any action scenes, but it’s also true that not everything has to be about girls. There are thousands of horse and pony books catering to the pre-teen girl demographic, books which I devoured indiscriminately and which rarely ever give equal time or weight to male characters – such that when I first read Misty I assumed that Maureen should naturally have a greater bond with the Phantom just because she was a girl. No one ever labels that a cause for concern, so a mix of recent and vintage horse books would balance out nicely.

Aside from that, not a lot to say. Every character is trustworthy and fair and probably most kids would wish they had grandparents like the Beebes. Oddly, Paul and Maureen’s parents are absent due to being in China (I guess Henry thought orphaning them would be too predictable).

Educational Properties: I would normally advise researching the true story behind the fiction, but in this case there is no historical sweep that would prove schoolworthy and Misty is meant for such young readers that there’s no point digging for disillusion here.

On the other hand, the wild ponies have been observed for decades, which offers quite a lot of information and data for a bit of natural science. Theories on how the ponies arrived on Assateague are also well worth researching. Those in nearby states might want to take a trip to the islands as well.

End of Guide.

I have copies of all three sequels to Misty, which I will be posting in the next few months. I can then embark on her larger bibliography, which consists mostly of other horse stories (one of which won the Newbery Medal), many of which were also illustrated by Wesley Dennis.

Up Next: A springtime poetry collection by Cicely Mary Barker.

Mystery: Tom Sawyer, Detective

On November 25, 2019November 21, 2019 By nymithIn Adventure, American writers, Mystery, Set in Arkansas, Superfluous Sequels2 Comments

Mark Twain had many talents but Stratemeyer Syndication wasn’t one of them.

book tom sawyer Title: Tom Sawyer, Detective
Author: Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Original Publication Date: 1896
Edition: The Complete Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Borders Classics (2006), 281 to 337 (56) of 337 pages.
Genre: Adventure. Mystery.
Ages: 11-13
First Sentence: Well, it was the next spring after me and Tom Sawyer set our old nigger Jim free the time he was chained up for a runaway slave down there on Tom’s Uncle Silas’s farm in Arkansaw.

Our scene opens upon a fairly decent description of spring fever on the parts of Tom and Huck, which leads immediately to an odd little passage as Huck details what thoughts this pent-up energy can lead to: …you want to go and be a wanderer; you want to go wandering far away to strange countries where everything is mysterious and wonderful and romantic. And if you can’t do that, you’ll put up with considerable less; you’ll go anywhere you can go, just so as to get away, and be thankful of the chance, too. This appears to be Twain’s way of saying the previous installment’s Arabian fantasia never happened, as the text otherwise refuses any acknowledgement of Tom Sawyer Abroad. Goodbye airship captain, hello Perry Mason.

https://tvguide1.cbsistatic.com/i/2019/03/22/6b96228a-1d98-4a52-aba1-1b70f3d8f4f9/7723ea02e4e58ff4fd479b156c8940ff/190322-raymond-burr-perry-mason.png — Raymond Burr is about to ruin some hoodlum’s day…

Also, goodbye Jim, who is nowhere to be found in this volume. It’s certainly more realistic than having him continue to be part of the gang, but a big part of the allure to sequels is in the audience’s desire to find out what happened to previous characters. Would it have killed Twain to insert one line of explanation? Jim headed north. Jim joined the Underground Railroad. Jim hopped a ship on route to Liberia. Something.

https://flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/c42-355.jpg — Remember this scene, Aunt Sally?

This leaves Tom and Huck, bored and looking for adventure, when Tom’s Aunt Sally sends for them because Uncle Silas has been in an altercation with his neighbours, brothers Brace and Jubiter Dunlap. It’s not clear why Aunt Sally thinks that Tom and Huck will be an asset, a “comfort” in these hard times, considering their last visit included heavy gaslighting of both her and her husband, vandalism of house and property, inciting a mob to violence and getting Tom shot in the leg, but no matter. The boys head down on the riverboat and run into Jubiter’s identical twin, Jake Dunlap, who was presumed dead years ago and is now on the way home with a fortune in stolen diamonds and two angry ex-partners in hot pursuit. Everyone arrives in Arkansas and murder is the result. Tom Sawyer must take to the stand and defend his uncle to unveil the real murderer among them.

Since this is a mystery, I will do my best to avoid spoilers, just in case someone does intend to read this book.

As much trouble as I’ve had with the Tom Sawyer sequels thus far, there have always been praiseworthy elements, even in the dubious science fiction of Tom Sawyer Abroad. At that point it still felt like Mark Twain was enjoying some part of the money-grubbing process, as the book had glimmers of wit and elegant passages hidden away where you least expected them. However, in this final installment, all those better qualities have shrunk almost to nothing in a tale that seems to exist only for the entertainment of its closing chapter. Twain seems completely bored with proceedings, keeping Tom and Huck on a very tight leash until near the end, when Tom decides to borrow a neighbour’s bloodhound. Until that point they are simply observers of the action, unable to get into mischief because mischief would create subplots and this book was written to be published in a hurry – it’s the shortest in the series, 56 pages to Abroad‘s 80, and it feels it. In previous volumes, Tom and Huck’s intelligence levels have been on a dizzying see-saw, but this is the first time they’ve felt so tired as characters.

https://cdn.britannica.com/03/6703-004-A81DF9EE/Steen-Steensen-Blicher-detail-drawing-ink-pencil.jpg — Steen Steensen Blicher (1782-1848), one of Denmark’s great writers who remains little known internationally.

Tom Sawyer, Detective is a mystery, which is not a genre Twain was suited for. Incidentally, he was later accused of plagiarizing this plot from a Danish crime novella called The Vicar of Weilby (now more commonly translated as The Rector of Veilbye), written in 1829 by Steen Blicher and itself based on a true event from 1626. The two stories are admittedly quite similar, although the original Danish is way more depressing (big surprise). It doesn’t appear that a consensus has ever been reached on whether the allegation was true or not, and I couldn’t find any information outside of Wikipedia, so it does not appear to be a big source of debate at present. Let’s move on.

For the plot, Twain makes use of identical twins, a conceit he also engaged with in Pudd’nhead Wilson – the problem with bringing such a topic into a mystery setting is that readers know immediately that there will be a case of mistaken identity at some point. Meanwhile, Uncle Silas’s farm is clearly at the center of a mystical convergence, as once again a bunch of criminals all descend on the same stand of trees at the same time as Huck and Tom – it’s given a slightly more probable setup than it was in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it certainly doesn’t make the already contrived plot feel any better. Then there’s the courtroom bit where Tom reveals the identity of an imposter because of a hand gesture he’d seen the man use before, and which the audience was never privy to in the first place. So the tale is at once predictable in its twists and impossible to “solve” alongside our erstwhile Perry Mason. All this on top of the problem that comes with Tom and Huck spending so much time watching and listening to other people rather than investigating. They spend four chapters thinking that their best clue is actually a supernatural occurrence, bogging the mystery down for the sake of a tired joke.

https://www.thekennelclub.org.uk/media/220836/credit_john_leslie.jpg — A kennel club bloodhound trial.

There are a couple of rays of light in all of this. First there’s the adorable scene where the boys wander across the countryside with a happy bloodhound, corpse-hunting. It’s a cute mix of ghoulish proclivities with classic childhood revels, and features the boys being proactive even though they feel like idiots for trying:

It was a lovely dog. There ain’t any dog that’s got a lovelier disposition than a bloodhound, and this one knowed us and liked us. He capered and raced around ever so friendly, and powerful glad to be free and have a holiday; but Tom was so cut up he couldn’t take any intrust in him, and said he wished he’d stopped and thought a minute before he ever started on such a fool errand. He said old Jeff Hooker would tell everybody, and we’d never hear the last of it.
So we loafed along home down the back lanes, feeling pretty glum and not talking. When we was passing the far corner of our tobacker field we heard the dog set up a long howl in there, and we went to the place and he was scratching the ground with all his might, and every now and then canting up his head sideways and fetching another howl.
It was a long square, the shape of a grave; the rain had made it sink down and show the shape. The minute we come and stood there we looked at one another and never said a word. When the dog had dug down only a few inches he grabbed something and pulled it up, and it was an arm and a sleeve. Tom kind of gasped out, and says–
“Come away, Huck–it’s found.”

This is an effective little scene hidden away in the midst of the slow plot, and the other entertaining portion is saved for the final courtroom scene, in which Tom takes to the stand to reveal the dastardly truth about every crime, stringing out each revelation for “effect” and feeling more like himself again – a final farewell to the brash, theatrical know-it-all. Energized by the limelight, Tom solves the case and gets the reward money, with our last glimpse of the pair summing up their friendship and their finest qualities in a rather beautiful sendoff: And so the whole family was as happy as birds, and nobody could be gratefuler and lovinger than what they was to Tom Sawyer; and the same to me, though I hadn’t done nothing. And when the two thousand dollars come, Tom give half of it to me, and never told anybody so, which didn’t surprise me, because I knowed him.

It’s a worthy goodbye to humble Huck and his compatriot, and I felt appropriately wistful as I closed the omnibus – an impressive feat, considering what a slog I found this volume to be. Despite building on established characters and settings here, I actually much preferred the wild departure of Tom Sawyer Abroad, which had greater amounts of wit, imagery and bafflement, wrapped in a sci-fi expedition that gave it a vague sense of fun. Tom Sawyer, Detective just made me wonder if Mark Twain were depressed when he wrote it. While very young kids might find the plot more surprising than their parents, I can’t recommend it when such series as Nancy Drew are so easily available.

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2014/07/Twain_looking_out_a_window-1/lead_720_405.jpg?mod=1533691683 — Mark Twain casting a cold eye on something.

To summarize my opinions on this series, there is sadly a good reason the last two volumes are so forgotten. They have not been unjustly spurned as I at first suspected, and even Twain’s use of the vernacular is far more sloppy than anything found in the truly perfectionist narrative he first gave Huck. When it comes down to it I would only recommend The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – a truly inspired and essential classic of children’s literature. Follow up with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn only if you’re studying the history of American literature, and the final two only from morbid curiosity. Reading all three sequels has not diminished the original though. Quite the opposite.

Parental Guide, with no spoilers.

Violence: It’s a murder mystery for kids. At some point, murder was struck from the list of appropriate mystery topics for juveniles and I’m not sure when it was added back into the mix (I’d suspect the 70s, and am genuinely curious to start collecting Edgar winners to find out). At any rate, the boys do witness a murder, in nowhere near the visceral detail of the bloody brawl in book one. There’s no way anyone who has already read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer would be bothered by anything in this book.

Values: The final passage seems to indicate that the best virtues in life are intelligence and humility, with Twain’s lack of satiric bite making it easier to get a read on such things…maybe.

Role Models: Tom and Huck are good kids, and even though they’re a bit tired on this outing, neither one feels like a caricature of their worst qualities. This is a nice note to go out on and is possibly the only reason this installment might be worth reading – although if you take my advice and skip all of the sequels, you’ll never have that problem in the first place.

Educational Properties: Nothing occurs to me.

End of Guide.

With that I conclude my first series for the WCC. From the start it wasn’t at all what I was expecting, but the complete Tom Sawyer was oddly endearing. As for Mark Twain, he only wrote one other novel that was intended for a juvenile audience – The Prince and the Pauper, which I have acquired a copy of and plan to review within the next few months.

Up Next: December, and to honor the Christmas spirit I will try to keep all reviews on books with a hopeful outlook (since I really don’t have enough Christmas-themed books for an entire month). So up next is Lloyd Alexander with a short novel in praise of the human condition.

Adventure: Tom Sawyer Abroad

On October 7, 2019March 16, 2020 By nymithIn Adventure, Aeronautical Novels, American writers, Bizarre Children's Books, Humour, Science Fiction, Set in North Africa, Steampunk, Superfluous Sequels1 Comment

Although written by Mark Twain, this particular Tom Sawyer adventure feels more like an unauthorized fanfiction, complete with random sci-fi insert and artificially tampering with established character traits… Oh wait…

book tom sawyer Title: Tom Sawyer Abroad
Author: Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Original Publication Date: 1894
Edition: The Complete Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Borders Classics (2006), 193 to 277 (85) of 337 pages
Genre: Adventure. Humour. Science Fiction.
Ages: 10-12
First Sentence: Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures?

Mark Twain had many talents but character continuity was not among them. The scene opens upon a grandstanding Tom Sawyer, a last gift from the hard swerve his character took during Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, thirsting for new adventures as the townsfolk slowly lose interest in his previous folly. Hearing of a mad inventor about to set sail in a balloon of his own invention, Tom decides to go see the launch, with Huck and Jim accompanying him. Why is Jim still hanging with them? Does he have a job? What about his family, still enslaved? Is he working to free them? Not a word about any of it, and the trio are off to St. Louis, where they see the strange balloon, which has wings and fans and all sorts of things, and wasn’t like any balloon you see in pictures, according to Huck. I just ended up picturing a miniature zeppelin – it was easier. The trio get abducted in a haphazard fashion and soon find themselves hundreds of miles across the ocean and on their way to London when their lunatic pilot plunges to his death and they are swept off course to the Sahara Desert…

It’s very difficult to recommend Tom Sawyer Abroad, as even the most enthusiastic Twain fans are dismissive of it. It is laced with problems, starting with the age group it’s written for. It’s clearly aimed at a younger audience than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and most kids who’ve successfully navigated that American hellscape would probably find Abroad somewhat juvenile. On the other hand, younger readers who just love Tom and want more of his adventures would probably have to skip Huckleberry Finn, rendering the beginning of this volume (and Jim’s inclusion) even more nonsensical than it already is. The third book in most series has a ready-made audience – this one, not so much.

The writing is also subpar on this outing; although narrated by Huck, the use of vernacular is looser and simplified, showing the speed at which Twain churned this one out, having entered financial ruin by this point in his life. Whatever organic interest he might have felt in this Verneian escapade dried up fairly quickly, judging by the slapdash “and then we all went home” ending. Oh yes, and then there’s the matter of the plot…

It doesn’t have one.

https://thewesterncornerofthecastle.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/9eedf-saharadesertmorocco.jpg — Camel train in the Sahara.

Tom Tom Sawyer Abroad is usually called a Jules Verne parody. Granted, I’ve only read one of Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages at this stage, but the statement doesn’t seem particularly accurate toward the meat of this short novel. It would be more telling to call it a predictor of Samuel Beckett, given that the bulk of the text is given over to dimwitted people embroiled in arguments while they and the audience wait for something to happen. There are a few vistas and scattered dramatic incidents but they mostly serve as triggers for the arguments Tom has with Huck and Jim, whether the topic be mirages, the speed a flea can travel at or the reason the Sahara has so much sand. In a curious about-face from the previous installment, Tom has regained his good traits and is once more capable of understanding the books he reads. He’s the one who figures out how to operate the balloon, he has memorized and retells portions of the Arabian Nights for their evening’s entertainments and he’s got the hopeless task of trying to argue the scientific facts of mirages and the earth’s rotation with the pair of nimrods he’s traveling with.

While Tom has regained his wits, it’s safe to say that Huck and Jim have utterly lost theirs to compensate. Huck’s characteristic street smarts are long gone by this point, while Jim’s main contribution to the crew is a tendency toward superstition and panic. I expect fans of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would be just as insulted by this depiction as I was by Tom’s in the previous. Sure, I might personally appreciate Tom’s disgusted remark that as for people like me and Jim, he’d just as soon have intellectual intercourse with a catfish, but it doesn’t change the fact that Twain treats his core characters very cheaply. Aunt Polly is more consistent over these three novels than any of the leads.

https://i0.wp.com/twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/applebaum/images/TS2.jpg — Way to go, Aunt Polly.

The thing is, with all of these caveats, I actually somewhat liked Tom Sawyer Abroad. Maybe I’ve just gotten used to Twain’s storytelling slip-ups but I found much of this little book vaguely entertaining rather than massively irritating. As dumb as the slapstick sequences are, the arguments Tom struggles to win have a certain obstreperous intent that I found endearing. After Jim maintains that the sun is (obviously) moving around the earth:

Tom turned on me, then, and says–
“What do you say–is the sun standing still?”
“Tom Sawyer, what’s the use to ask such a jackass question? Anybody that ain’t blind can see it don’t stand still.”
“Well,” he says, “I’m lost in the sky with no company but a parsel of low-down animals that don’t know no more than the head boss of a university did three or four hundred years ago. Why, blame it, Huck Finn, there was Popes, in them days, that knowed as much as you do.”
It warn’t fair play, and I let him know it. I says–
“Throwin’ mud ain’t arguin’, Tom Sawyer.”
“Who’s throwin’ mud?”
“You done it.”
“I never. It ain’t no disgrace, I reckon, to compare a backwoods Missouri muggings like you to a Pope, even the orneriest one that ever set on the throne. Why, it’s an honor to you, you tadpole, the Pope’s the one that’s hit hard, not you…”

Tom Sawyer, hero to every kid who’s ever felt superior for knowing about centrifugal force, the Fibonacci Sequence, Charles Martel, The Iliad or [insert your own nerd credential here]. The poor lad even has to deconstruct his insults for them. I suppose there is a chance that some juvenile readers would relate to Tom’s mindset here, provided they could look past the surrounding deficiencies of plot.

https://i0.wp.com/ens-newswire.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/20131205_lion.jpg — The African lion (Panthera leo) has never made its home in the Sahara, preferring savannahs and riverlands.

On that front, as silly as it is to read about “lions and tigers” in the Sahara (to say nothing of the repeated gag in which Huck is left stranded at the bottom of the balloon’s rope ladder sweeping along like a giant cat toy with the “lions and tigers” in pursuit while Tom looks for a safe place to deposit him), there is some throwaway imagery here deserving of a more well-crafted tome:

We were watching the shadder of the balloon slide along the ground, and now and then gazing off across the Desert to see if anything was stirring, and then down on the shadder again, when all of a sudden almost right under us we see a lot of men and camels laying scattered about, perfectly quiet, like they was asleep.
We shut off the power, and backed up and stood over them, and then we see that they was all dead. It give us the cold shivers. And it made us hush down, too, and talk low, like people at a funeral. We dropped down slow and stopped, and me and Tom clumb down and went amongst them. There was men, and women, and children. They was dried by the sun and dark and shriveled and leathery, like the pictures of mummies you see in books. And yet they looked just as human, you wouldn’t a believed it; just like they was asleep, some laying on their backs, with their arms spread on the sand, some on their sides, some on their faces, just as natural, though the teeth showed more than usual. Two or three was setting up. One was a woman, with her head bent over, and a child was laying across her lap. A man was setting with his hands locked around his knees, staring out of his dead eyes at a young girl that was stretched out before him. He looked so mournful, it was pitiful to see.

http://www.trbimg.com/img-4fd0f68d/turbine/la-ca-mark-twain-20120610 — Mark Twain.

It seems unlikely that Twain had a developed plot in mind for Tom Sawyer Abroad, as after a series of random encounters, extensive arguments and occasional soapboxing, he wraps the whole thing up and deposits the adventurers back home with Aunt Polly in the space of one page. However, the feeling I’m left with in this particular entry in the haphazard tales of Tom Sawyer (hardly a series as we would consider it today) is of disappointment for what this could have been, rather than frustration at what it was. After all, Tom Sawyer is in the public domain, and I could picture a really fantastic adventure being spun from this premise, packed with historical details and steampunk flourishes, with all three leads in character at once and all manner of exciting incidents and clever shout-outs to Twain, Verne and Beckett. Sadly, that book does not exist, nor does this unloved volume have the cult status likely to inspire it.

All theories for improvement aside, this is another superfluous sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, giving only a few hints at what sort of man Tom might grow up to be while breaking almost all continuity with that classic. If you’re a mad fan of Mark Twain, or enjoy collecting peculiar children’s books, this might be of interest.

See Also: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the classic that started this whole crazy train of rafting and ballooning adventures, with marvelous writing and delightful comedic (and dramatic) sequences.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the literary juggernaut meant for older readers, full of satiric darkness and incredibly stupid decisions made by all of the main characters.

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne, an enchanting adventure for Victorian enthusiasts of all ages. Contains no balloon in spite of what your memories might be telling you.

Parental Guide, always a tricky thing for Mark Twain’s books.

Violence: There are occasional beduin attacks, but there’s never any dread on the part of the characters and usually they just pull their balloon up and watch the skirmish from a safe height. The encounter with the mummified dead, and a later sandstorm which buries a peaceful group of beduin without trace, are exceptions – Tom and company are shaken and these eerie sequences are standouts as a result.

Twain in Nikola Tesla’s lab remains one of the coolest historical photos of all time.

The mad inventor plummets to his death in a storm, with his demise being lit by the flashes of midnight lightning in a prediction of classic horror movies to come – and given that he fell while trying to push Tom out instead, it’s understandable that he is not then missed.

Values: Twain doesn’t seem to like Jules Verne much. Or the Crusades. Or the newspapers. As usual, it’s hard to tell what he actually does like. Tom’s education/intelligence seems to be slowly driving a wedge between him and Huck, such that it’s hard to picture them still being friends as adults, but I can’t tell if that was deliberate commentary or not.

Role Models: Huck and Jim are a total wash in this area. Granted they weren’t the most proactive pair before, but it’s still noticeable how little dignity either one now possesses. Tom is now a miniature man of action, still utterly indifferent to any worry he might be putting Aunt Polly to, but he’s moved on from being a prankster to a know-it-all.

Educational Properties: Most Victorian children’s books, whatever other failings they might have, would help your child to read at a higher level. This is one of the weaker offerings in that regard.

The best role this book could take in a homeschool setting would probably be to parse out the arguments as a demonstration of sophistry, strawmanning, logical fallacy, devil’s advocacy and other fun aspects of rhetoric.

There’s not enough detail to match this novel with a study on the Sahara, but assigning kids to design the balloon might lead to some artistic engineering attempts.

End of Guide.

One more to go and I’m done with the strange saga of Tom Sawyer. Expect the final volume in November. If anyone has ever read this book, please leave a comment with your opinion. I liked it better than it probably deserved but, in all fairness to Twain, at least he tried new things every time rather than rubber-stamping each new adventure with the same old form. Doubtless I shall look back on these with fondness when I’m embroiled in the 18 sequels to The Boxcar Children.

Up Next: An extended hiatus for family reasons. I shall return in November, probably with the next Anne novel. We shall see.

Adventure Novels: Around the World in Eighty Days

On September 14, 2019September 15, 2019 By nymithIn Adventure, Classics, French Writers, Young Adult1 Comment

A glorious Victorian travel extravaganza, more exciting than it has any right to be.

Title: Around the World in Eighty Days (Extraordinary Voyages #11)
Author: Jules Verne (1828-1905)
Translator: George Makepeace Towle (1819-1900)
Original Publication Date: 1872
Edition: Dover Publications, Inc. (2015), 170 pages
Genre: Adventure. Humour.
Ages: 11-15
First Sentence: Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814.

Inveterate whist-player Phileas Fogg takes up a wager that he can make it around the world in eighty days, a calculation considered technically accurate but impossible to carry out, given that even a single delay of the sort frequent in travel (breakdowns, weather) would render the entire journey a failure. Fogg is honour-bound and OCD enough to attempt it though, and off he goes with his freshly-hired French manservant Passpartout on a wild spending spree that takes them from the Suez Canal, across India, along the coast of China and on a madcap journey across the barbarous land that is…the United States of America. Fogg never loses his cool but unluckily for him, dogged Detective Fix is on his trail, determined to bring him to justice for a bank robbery that took place right before Fogg left on his globetrotting quest – a very suspicious coincidence given the large suitcase full of cash he carries with him. Will Fogg win his bet? Will Fix get his man? Will Passepartout have a nervous breakdown before the finish line?

It turns out that Around the World in Eighty Days is an absurdly charming novel, centered on a voyage so far-fetched that it’s truly impressive how Jules Verne is able to make it seem so incredibly urgent that Phileas Fogg win his bet. It feels certain that Fogg will triumph in the end, yet the odds remain so impossible that pages are turned with increasing speed to see how he will outmaneuver each problem on what becomes the world’s biggest obstacle course. Helping the reader in this are the short chapter lengths, always between three and six pages in the Dover edition, which take full advantage of the original newspaper serial format that Verne wrote it for.

https://thewesterncornerofthecastle.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/21ad6-pagodaatmalabarhillnearbombay252cindia.jpg — The pagoda towers on Malabar Hill.

The sight-seeing is depicted with full relish, regardless of Fogg’s complete disinterest in all matters unrelated to his time table. Mr. Fogg, after bidding good-bye to his whist partners, left the steamer, gave his servant several errands to do, urged it upon him to be at the station promptly at eight, and, with his regular step, which beat to the second, like an astronomical clock, direct his steps to the passport office. As for the wonders of Bombay–its famous city hall, its splendid library, its forts and docks, its bazaars, mosques, synagogues, its Armenian churches, and the noble pagoda on Malabar Hill with its two polygonal towers–he cared not a straw to see them. He would not deign to examine even the masterpieces of Elephanta, or the mysterious hypogea, concealed south-east from the docks, or those fine remains of Buddhist architecture, the Kanherian grottoes of the island of Salcette. As you can tell, this novel has absolute confidence in its references and encourages armchair traveling – this would have been an enormous part of its original appeal to readers of all ages and there’s less reason than ever to be intimidated by Verne’s exotic travelogue in this day and age.

What’s especially amusing if you’re part of the American audience is his depiction of the U.S. as a vast and violent land where political elections are violent brawls in the street and the Sioux are accustomed to attacking trains, yet commerce eventually transforms even the wildest frontier towns into bustling hives of trade. A first glimpse of San Francisco: From his exalted position Passepartout observed with much curiosity the wide streets, the low, evenly ranged houses, the Anglo-Saxon Gothic churches, the great docks, the palatial wooden and brick warehouses, the numerous conveyances, omnibuses, horse-cars, and upon the sidewalks, not only Americans and Europeans, but Chinese and Indians. Passepartout was surprised at all he saw. San Francisco was no longer the legendary city of 1849,–a city of banditti, assassins, and incendiaries, who had flocked hither in crowds in pursuit of plunder; a paradise of outlaw, where they gambled with gold-dust, a revolver in one hand and a bowie-knife in the other: it was now a great commercial emporium.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/San_francisco_1860.jpg — Vista of San Francisco, 1860, by French painter and lithographer Isidore Laurent Deroy.

All of this colorful material would be little more than an opinionated encyclopedia were it not for the comic trio that traverse the pages. Phileas Fogg is something of a prototype for the cool-headed British man of action, jet-setting (as it were) with watch in hand, impeccable manners and rock-solid stoicism. He is the man who conquers time through sheer logic and indominability:

“Mr. Fogg this is a delay greatly to your disadvantage.”
“No, Sir Francis; it was foreseen.”
“What! You knew that the way-“
“Not at all; but I knew that some obstacle or other would sooner or later arise on my route. Nothing, therefore, is lost. I have two days which I have already gained to sacrifice. A steamer leaves Calcutta for Hong Kong at noon, on the 25th. This is the 22nd, and we shall reach Calcutta in time.”
There was nothing to say to so confident a response.

Serving as foil, there is the comical manservant Passepartout, who begins a baffled underling but comes to see his employer as a great man. However, he never does share Fogg’s confidence that all obstacles can be overcome. A retired acrobat, his athleticism comes in handy on the road, while his folly creates many of the obstacles that Fogg must conquer. To keep the reader from seeing Passepartout as a millstone that Fogg should abandon on route, Verne takes care to give each mishap a fresh extenuating circumstance.

https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255-s01/students/Kelly-E-Buttermore/images/javert.jpg — Portrait of Javert, from the first edition of Les Miserables, by French artist Gustave Brion.

Lastly, there is Detective Fix, who is the most complicated and interesting of the three as he is the most changeable in his pursuit of what he believes to be the world’s most eccentric bank robber. He is a droll variation on the great Javert archetype as he morphs from friend to foe and back again, set on his purpose but increasingly perplexed by Fogg’s behaviour and therefore always having to question the nature of the supposed rascal he’s pursuing. Fix is a very dynamic character, such that Around the World doesn’t really get good until his appearance in Suez.

Rounding out the cast is the late addition of Aouda, a beautiful Indian of the highest caste whom Fogg and Passepartout rescue from a passing “suttee.” She’s as fair as a European, has received a full European education in Bombay, is a match for Fogg in stoicism and knows how to use a pistol. Fogg and Passepartout end up carting her all the way round the world and she holds her own in the endeavor – girl even knows how to play whist. With this honorary European along for the ride, everything is in place – romance, adventure, comedy, thrilling suspense, twists of fortune and ever-shifting scenery from elephant rides to opium dens…

Around the World in Eighty Days is a lightweight volume, all the more surprising considering the troubled times it was written in. Verne kept a stiff upper lip as well as any Englishman by crafting this wild caper in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War. It doesn’t feel like a children’s classic as we would think of it, but this would be a boon to homeschooling families as Verne touches on everything from Victorian world history to scientific innovation to mathematical calculations. The casual historicity extending from the first sentence of this volume, along with its elegant sentence structure, generous vocabulary and competent adult heroes are not things you’ll find represented in most modern YA. This in itself demonstrates why the old books are irreplaceable and well worth adding to your children’s library. Around the World in Eighty Days is also worth reading for any adult fans of old-school adventures, as it is a delight through and through.

See Also: The Scarlet Pimpernel, another example of rich language matched with a plot that is accessible to younger readers, thus bridging the gap between children’s classics and grown-up ones.

Parental Guide, with some spoilers.

Violence: The concept of sati is introduced, as is that of dueling – though neither event takes place, it’s clear what would happen if they did. There’s a brawl in San Francisco, but it isn’t until the Sioux attack the train that we get some really descriptive bloodshed: Twenty Sioux had fallen mortally wounded to the ground, and the wheels crushed those who fell upon the rails as if they had been worms. Later, after the battle: All the passengers had got out of the train, the wheels of which were stained with blood. From the ties and spokes hung ragged pieces of flesh. As far as the eye could reach on the white plain behind, red trails were visible.

Values: Pure Victorian Age goodness here. Logic and strength defeat every obstacle, engineering is a continuous marvel and honor is held in such high regard that to back out of a wager is impossible.

The Victorians believed in hierarchies of civilization and much of that confidence and willingness to judge other cultures is displayed here, which may not be to every taste. Verne refers to those who willingly participate in sati as stupid fanatics, while Aouda, who had to be drugged to ensure her cooperation in the matter, is a charming woman, in all the European acceptation of the phrase. Far from being too harsh a judge of the foreign climes his heroes traverse, Verne is remarkably tolerant – at one point even embarrassingly naive, giving a passing mention to the savage Papuans, who are in the lowest scale of humanity, but are not, as has been asserted, cannibals. Sorry, Monsieur Verne, they really, really are.

https://www.globalgiving.org/pfil/21710/pict_grid7.jpg?tms=1523280442000 — Indian elephant (elephas maximus indicus).

One very pleasant surprise herein is the treatment afforded animals. Older books have a tendency to be callous on this subject, but Verne’s ideal gentlemen treat animals (and women, and servants) with every courtesy. The elephant Kiouri is purchased to make a crossing of the forests of India and is in the end made a gift (alongside the agreed payment) to the loyal Parsee who drove and tended the gentle creature.

Oh, and this is now the second children’s classic I have found about the great power of the bribe to overcome obstacles, and Verne acknowledges the importance of Fogg’s tremendous wealth. Up to this time money had smoothed away every obstacle. Now money failed.

Role Models: Fogg is eccentric but an impeccable gentleman through every trial. Passepartout is loyal and brave, and always looks for ways to be of help, especially after making mistakes. Aouda is equal to the task of winning the wager, can handle a firearm under duress and offers to marry Fogg rather than the other way around, but she’s never less than gracious and feminine – modern YA could learn something here. Even Fix has admirable qualities despite being essentially the villain. Verne also allows each of these characters a chace to salvage the expedition in successive eleventh hours, so no one is ever dead weight to the tale.

Educational Properties: The Extraordinary Voyages were conceived as a way to present the most up-to-date information available on all subjects of scientific knowledge in an entertaining framework. The books do not actually lose anything by being out of date, as they can act as both a spur and a grounding for researching modern theories and revelations. Around the World offers material on the history of transportation, scientific innovations for logistical quandaries. Logistics ties in to mathematics, calculations of speed, distance and the circumference of the earth. There is a wide range of geography covered and then global history and culture in the 1860s and 70s. A wealth of material for what is quite a short book, that is only one of fifty-four standalone books in this series. Though English language translations are renowned mainly for not doing justice to Verne’s vision, I should still think these Voyages an excellent resource. Bonus: If your family is bi-lingual French or committed to mastering the language, that regrettable problem can be bypassed.

End of Guide.

Given that I can only review 52 books per year and since the Extraordinary Voyages all function as stand-alones, this is one series I will have to proceed with at my own slow pace. In case you’re wondering why I have not mentioned or pictured a hot air balloon in this review, that’s because the balloon was a later Hollywood addition (ignoring the obvious fact that a balloon is by no means a reliable way to get from point A to point B instead of drifting to point J). Verne’s first contribution to the Voyages was actually Five Weeks in a Balloon, which is where the association of Verne and balloons began. Adding to the confusion, Around the World in Eighty Days is sometimes published in omnibus form with Five Weeks in a Balloon, though the stories are entirely unrelated.

Up Next: My final post on E.B. White with his final children’s novel.

Adventure Novels: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

On August 17, 2019September 22, 2019 By nymithIn 1000 Good Books List, Adventure, American writers, Bizarre Children's Books, Classics, Poison Pills, Superfluous Sequels, Young Adult2 Comments

If you loved The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for its prose or its characters or even its brand of humour, then I have some bad news for you. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (whose loss of the definite article has always been a pet peeve of mine) is not a true sequel or even a companion volume to that first installment – rather, it is a wholly separate entity piggybacking on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to that novel’s and its own detriment. Bear with me as I wrestle my sprawling notes into form, as this will be almost twice as long as my regular reviews…

Title: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Author: Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Illustrator: Edward Winsor Kemble (1861-1933)
Original Publication Date: 1884
Edition: New Riverside Editions (2000), pages 69 to 320 of 392 pages.
Genre: Adventure. Humour. Historical Fiction.
Ages: 14-17
First Sentence: You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter.

I owe a great deal of the following information to the contextual material included in the New Riverside Edition, specifically ‘The Composition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn‘ by Victor A. Doyno and ‘Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1958)’ by Henry Nash Smith. Smith incidentally cautions against what I am about to do when he says “a book so clearly great, yet with such evident defects, poses a difficult critical problem. There is little profit in making a mere checklist of faults and beauties. We must try to see the book integrally.” There are apparently rules to reading Huckleberry Finn. I didn’t know this and it is now considerably too late for me to start playing by them.

https://thewesterncornerofthecastle.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/057bb-mark-twain-.jpg — Mark Twain.

So to really understand the artistic debacle that is this novel, we have to start with a recap not of the plot, but of its very creation. Mark Twain began work on it in 1876, upon completing Tom Sawyer and got the plot well underway before losing steam and setting the manuscript aside for several years. In the meantime he went to Europe, got irritated at the aristocracy and wrote The Prince and the Pauper. Between 1879 and 1880 he returned to Huckleberry Finn and wrote the middle portion of the work, filled with feuds, charlatans and angry mobs. He also added a ‘Snicket Warning Label’ to the front of the book (more on that in a moment), presumably not willing to spend the extra time reworking part one to match up with his new interests and themes in part two. Then he lost interest and put the manuscript aside for another three years. Twain finally finished it up from 1883 to 1885, tagging on the ending – which is famously reviled even by those who in the same breath call Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the Great American Novel. To be fair, he also went back into the early portion and added the eerie sequence set on the wreck of the Walter Scott, which provides a window into what the whole book could have been had he pursued further revisions. Instead, he sent it to print and made some quick cash.

Now, about that warning label. NOTICE: Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. Does ironic self-criticism ward off or negate external criticism? It certainly seems to have worked for Twain, at least as far as the plot warning goes.

The plot I’m not supposed to look for begins in a very straightforward manner: Huck flees from his abusive father, runs into escaped slave Jim and they decide to drift down the Mississippi on a raft to the mouth of the Ohio River. Jim will then be able to make his way north to freedom, Huck will be safe from his father finding him and there’s just one problem: Mark Twain didn’t know about the Ohio, he knew about the lower Mississippi and that’s what he wanted to write about. His solution to this problem of plot versus intention was for Huck and Jim to travel in a fog, overshoot the Ohio and have to find a canoe to get back up the river. Fair enough, but Twain then ceased to care about his original story at all. For a large portion of the book they have acquired a canoe and yet they just keep drifting down the Mississippi against all logic because Twain was unwilling to go back and rework his early material to fit his new direction. He had also conceived an antipathy to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at some point in all this, which perhaps explains his slow work on the follow-up and certainly explains the new and improved Tom Sawyer we get in the finished product.

https://www.raptisrarebooks.com/images/52070/adventures-of-tom-sawyer-mark-twain-first-edition-signed-1876-rare.jpg — Tom Sawyer from the first edition frontispiece.

If you really loved Tom in his book, there is pretty much nothing for you here. The clever and admirable boy is completely gone and his superstitions and make-believe have now transformed into an inability to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. The problem is very obvious if you read the two novels close together: Tom explains quite cogently what “ransom” means at the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, while in the opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn he is suddenly clueless about the word, saying “per’aps if we keep them till they’re ransomed, it means that we keep them till they’re dead.” I read the scene carefully to see if maybe Tom was pranking his friends in some way, but no, it’s just a lengthy and not terribly funny joke on Twain’s part. Tom is now just as ignorant as his peers and can’t even comprehend the stories he so avidly devours. His pranks are cruel and actively dangerous. The boy who testified to save an innocent man from execution, delaying to the last moment from fear, now makes revelations for “dramatic effect.” His code, his better qualities, are all gone.

On the other hand, if you really thought Tom was just a brat in his book, but loved The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the writing, there is still little for you here. Twain trades in the larger-than-life narration that was a big part of Tom Sawyer‘s charm and turns to the first-person American vernacular. This is a historic moment in American literature and I’m certainly not saying it’s a bad decision or the wrong choice to make – it just further distances the two volumes from each other. Many people read Huckleberry Finn first, or never get around to Tom Sawyer because “it’s just a kid’s book,” and I suppose doing so would negate several of my criticisms. Huckleberry Finn breaks so thoroughly away from its predecessor in form, character and content that being a sequel actually does it a disservice. Here’s a taste of Twain’s excellent use of the vernacular, from Huck’s time spent abducted and living up in the woods with his father:

He kept me with him all the time, and I never got a chance to run off. We lived in that old cabin, and he always locked the door and put the key under his head, nights. He had a gun which he had stole, I reckon, and we fished and hunted, and that was what we lived on. Every little while he locked me in and went down to the store, three miles, to the ferry, and traded fish and game for whiskey and fetched it home and got drunk and had a good time, and licked me. The widow she found out where I was, by-and-by, and she sent a man over to try to get hold of me, but pap drove him off with the gun, and it warn’t long after that till I was used to being where I was, and liked it, all but the cowhide part.
It was kind of lazy and jolly, laying off comfortable all day, smoking and fishing, and no books nor study. Two months or more run along, and my clothes got to be all rags and dirt, and I didn’t see how I’d ever got to like it so well at the widow’s, where you had to wash, and eat on a plate, and comb up, and go to bed and get up regular, and be forever bothering over a book and have old Miss Watson pecking at you all the time. I didn’t want to go back no more. … It was pretty good times up in the woods there, take it all around.

https://flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/huck-solid-comfort.jpg — Huck having a good time, E.W. Kemble illustration.

After Huck escapes down the river with Jim he revels in his new freedom – a freedom that looks almost identical to the above passage, the ability to loll about and do nothing all day rather than build a new life for himself. Always moving but never going anywhere, and that’s before the raft gets hijacked by the so-called King and the Duke, a pair of charlatans that Huck and Jim put up with while they go from town to town playing a variety of con games. At this point in the novel, Huck and Jim have a canoe, they could easily give the charlatans the slip and make a getaway and they don’t because it’s too much trouble. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way. So they continue to clock in the miles down to Arkansas.

My opinion of this novel would actually be fairly high if I could believe that this was the point. After all, being worthlessly free on a raft and going south to go north have merit for satire, but none of this seems to have been Twain’s intention. I can’t find any critics taking up the idea that Huck and Jim are meant to be comic figures of incompetent fun. Twain doesn’t spend very much of his time mocking the two of them – they are the good guys in this story, society’s outcasts, and Twain clearly despises society. His Mississippi feels more like the River Styx a lot of the time. Twain’s disgust is very genuine – this is the man who expressed approval for both French and nascent Russian revolutions in the last years of his life – and this explains his treatment of Tom Sawyer as well. Tom can get along with society and succeed in it, which seemingly makes him part of the problem in Twain’s eyes.

The moral conviction of the book does have the desired effect at points. The Grangerford-Shepherdson feud is one of the best portions, with Huck arriving amongst the well-to-do Grangerford family and, with sincere admiration in his heart, accidentally ridiculing their lifestyle, including the Mortuary School of poetry, in the obituary verse and paintings left behind by a deceased daughter of the family. Huck pores over them and concludes: Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned, that with her disposition, she was having a better time in the graveyard. When the Grangerfords are wiped out in a day, Huck watching in horror from a nearby tree, it matters to the reader because it mattered to Huck. I ain’t agoing to tell all that happened–it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night, to see such things. Emotional impact is similarly gained during the charlatans’ lengthy con of the Wilks’ daughters, because Huck cares for virtuous Mary Jane Wilks and hates to watch the game go down. This adds some tension to the tale, especially when he becomes proactive for her sake. There are things that are good about this book, but they are overshadowed more and more heavily by flaws as the plot progresses to its insane conclusion.

https://flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/twain-huck-finn-kemble-28a.jpg — Poor Mary Jane gets put through the wringer.

Regarding the King and the Duke, Twain’s wholehearted commitment to satire on this outing damages one of the most successful features of Tom Sawyer, namely a credible villain. Injun Joe was a terrifying psychopath and far scarier than anything Twain serves up in this technically darker work, because now every evil is dished up with a load of vaudeville humour alongside. Pap is one of the worst fathers in literature, and Huck’s situation with him is grim and alarming, but pap is not that frightening because Twain is clearly showing him up as a slack-jawed moron the whole time. The charlatans are even worse, one introducing himself as “the rightful Duke of Bridgewater” and the other following up with saying he’s the “rightful King of France” and then he said it often made him feel easier and better for a while if people treated him according to his rights, and got down on one knee to speak to him, and always called him “Your Majesty,” and waited on him first at meals, and didn’t set down in his presence till he asked them. So Jim and me set to majestying him, and doing this and that and t’other for him, and standing up till he told us we might set down. This done him heaps of good, and so he got cheerful and comfortable. Twain’s humour in the previous volume relied mostly on verbal wit which was sophisticated enough to sail over kids’ heads much of the time. Huckleberry Finn features far more broad comedy, both backwoods humour and slapstick. If you like that better, you’re in luck, but from my point of view it’s not an improvement.

https://a4.pbase.com/g9/09/268309/3/160638773.xDDv4MGd.jpg — Huck and Jim asleep after a hard night’s drifting.

There is one single element of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that works perfectly: the evolving friendship of Huck and Jim, and Huck’s changed attitude regarding Jim’s status as a slave. Yes, Huck’s battle with his conscience is riveting and tremendously realistic. His famous decision to “go to hell” and commit to the crime of stealing a slave is a great moment in American literature. It’s also only two pages long. Alas, alack, the Huck and Jim relationship is a subplot. Everyone talks about it and I was going to pitch in with my praise but since I’ve broken the other rules of reading Huck Finn I might as well break this one too.

However, at least reading the book has finally cleared up one mystery for me. It is now very clear why the ALA continues to defend Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with such energy, when no other old children’s book qualifies; no, I do not consider a negative defense a real one. The story of Huck Finn is a blueprint for many of the young adult (and now middle grade) themes the ALA loves to champion: Huck is from a broken home, he must make his own way and pointedly not learn from his elders who are all morally compromised and/or bankrupt. Instead, he joins forces with an outsider in society, who is a far better role model in every way. Huck’s most important character trait is compassion (I would have said lying, but if the Jim story is the most important part of the book, Huck’s lies are incidental to his changed view of Jim) and being caring is today’s cardinal virtue, rather than being courageous, strong, intelligent, honest, hard-working or decisive. Meanwhile, white society is a rotten structure with racism just the cherry on top – unlike Tom Sawyer or Little House or other old books the ALA mostly ignores these days, where an independently reading child might not even notice the racism and prefer to admire the good qualities being shown instead. This is indeed remarkably modern.

Last things last, we come to the artist’s solution to his problem of plot. Keep in mind it took him eight years to come up with this. Spoilers beyond.

https://flaglerlive.com/wp-content/uploads/c34-293.jpg — The shed Jim gets stuck in for roughly a quarter of the novel.

Huck and Jim have drifted eleven hundred miles away from St. Petersburg, Missouri when the charlatans have a streak of bad luck and do the natural thing: hand over Jim for the “reward money” from an invented flybill. Huck has his final crisis of conscience and commits to saving Jim, tracking him to a little one-horse cotton plantation owned by one Silas Phelps. Then, in the most outrageous Dickensian twist I think I’ve ever read, this man turns out to be Tom Sawyer’s uncle and Huck gets mistaken for Tom, who just so happens to be expected down for a visit. Huck ropes in Tom to help free Jim and the infamously stupid jailbreak plot ensues – basically, to reenact the great escapes from The Count of Monte Cristo and the like. This is justly criticized; however, nobody ever gives Tom’s plan credit for at least being lightyears ahead of Huck’s proposal. The following paragraph is legitimately the funniest part of this whole book and I’ve bolded the important bits:

“My plan is this,” I says. “We can easy find out if it’s Jim in there. Then get up my canoe to-morrow night, and fetch my raft over from the island. Then the first dark night that comes, steal the key out of the old man’s britches, after he goes to bed, and shove off down the river on the raft, with Jim, hiding daytimes and running nights, the way me and Jim used to do before. Wouldn’t that plan work?“

I almost laughed till I cried. To think I complained about Tom’s drop in intelligence when Huckleberry Finn now has the collective I.Q. of a ham sandwich and a jar of mayonnaise.

https://i0.wp.com/huckleberry.pbworks.com/f/thinking_it_over.jpg — Please stop.

It would have been so, so easy for Mark Twain to fix this if he even pretended to care. JUST GET RID OF THE CANOE. Seriously, this book is supposed to be loaded with metaphorical significance, and what better than for the one thing that should be common along the river, the key to the north and freedom, to be so elusive that they are forced to drift south, sustained by the hope that today there’ll be an unguarded or drifting canoe that will turn everything around for them. This is the laziest fix possible – I can see why he might not have wanted to overhaul the whole thing by having Jim part with Huck at the Ohio, or turn the whole book on its head by starting down at Phelps’s plantation and going up the river, but he could have done something. Why are you asking me to accept this plot as the work of a genius? Oh right, because I’m not supposed to talk about the plot, I’m supposed to talk about Jim.

Anyway, Twain wasn’t done with his masterpiece yet. After Tom’s ludicrous escape plan is ruined, he gets shot in the leg and Jim gets recaptured. Tom then reveals that Jim’s been freed this whole time – his owner had a crisis of conscience on her deathbed – and Tom set the whole escape plan up just to have some fun.

Well, at least someone is.

But why limit yourself to one twist, or even just two, when you could really knock em down with a third whole plot twist? On the last actual page of this lunatic book, Jim reveals to Huck that his evil pap is dead – the body they found in an early night on the river, which Jim didn’t let Huck get a look at, was pap all along, and Huck could have gone home anytime after that. Who cares if the likelihood of stumbling over Huck’s dead dad was fairly minute? I mean, does probability even matter after the convergence of Tom, Huck, Jim and Uncle Silas on a patch of land in Arkansas? Who cares if this reduces Huck’s entire journey and the traumas he’s endured to a shaggy dog story? Who cares if this turns Jim, previously a caring father-figure to Huck, into a selfish manipulator of a poor child? Or maybe this was just Twain’s way of saying that there truly is nothing good in American society after all? What a twist!

End Spoilers.

It’s possible I would have a more favorable opinion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn if I hadn’t already read Pudd’nhead Wilson, another of his late works where he did the exact same thing – started one story, lost interest, switched focus (this time completely) and instead of going back and starting over, he rushed his comedy-turned-tragedy-turned-detective-story to print for fast revenue. I am well aware that Mark Twain had financial difficulties. So did a lot of great writers, yet they somehow stuck to their artistry – often at the expense of family and friends, though some of them even had day jobs. Twain’s talent and innovation are here placed at the service of rank commercialism, for why else would he persist in a sequel to a work he had lost interest in? Because The Adventures of Tom Sawyer had become a popular novel, so much that he later knocked out two more short sequels starring these beloved characters, sequels which everyone agrees were pure commercial product.

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/17/93/19/17931907345bc34062dafffd88db9567--huckleberry-finn-classic-books.jpg — The iconic first edition.

My personal response to this novel was so strongly negative that I find it impossible to fairly judge it as part of the Castle Project. I do not know what kind of a reaction it would get from young readers, beyond pointing out that many, many people do love this book and seem to find it a gripping story. The only thing I can state for certain is that it is a superfluous sequel in that outside of Huck himself, the second book offers no real continuation of the material in the first and is not necessary to complete the experience. If you stick to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a stand-alone, it’s not going to hurt anything.

Parental Guide, which I will keep brief.

Violence: Drunken abuse from pap, a family feud ending in massacre, a ghost story about a dead baby, a man shot down in the street, a couple of angry mobs forming, an incident of tarring and feathering, gold being hidden with a corpse in a coffin, casual references made to animal cruelty, murder, drownings, cruel pranks and crueller cons, much talk of slavery and copious quantities of the word “nigger.” I might be forgetting something. All is told in a tone of mixed humour and disgust not generally associated with youth literature until fairly recently.

Values: Black people are human beings and should no more be slaves than anyone else. Society is a disease. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another, as Huck thinks late in the book.

Role Models: Huck lies, steals and passively watches the King and the Duke rip off town after town before becoming proactive for the sake of Mary Jane. Jim briefly becomes the best character in the book right after the charlatans sell him, when he quite logically pays them back by spreading word about their con game, leading to them finally getting the tar and feathering they so richly deserve. Given that they betrayed a guy who could squeal on them and didn’t even have sense to blow town afterward, it’s extra satisfying. And yes, Huck and Jim together on the raft in harmony is truly a lesson to us all – though given how things literally go south for them I’m not sure I want to unpack that metaphor.

Educational Properties: Most people use this to discuss race relations in America but I expect you know by now what I’d suggest: a structural autopsy.

End of Guide.

There are two more (thankfully short) books in the Tom Sawyer series and I do already own them. Since the third volume, Tom Sawyer Abroad, gives me some Jules Verne vibes, I’m scheduling Around the World in Eighty Days for next month. This will hopefully give me some time to recover myself and gain some at least morbid curiosity for the remainder. I am genuinely shocked by just how much I hated this book, given how rewarding I found Tom Sawyer.

Up Next: I’m leapfrogging right over the 20th Century and into the 21st at last, with a work of historical fiction by Janet Taylor Lisle.

Adventure Novels: Shane

On August 3, 2019March 16, 2020 By nymithIn Adventure, American Frontier, American writers, Historical Fiction, Set in Wyoming, Westerns, Young AdultLeave a comment

A great introduction to the western, although if you don’t like westerns this will not do much to convince you otherwise.

Title: Shane
Author: Jack Schaefer (1907-1991)
Original Publication Date: 1949
Edition: Bantam Pathfinder Editions (1966), 119 pages
Genre: Western. Adventure. Historical Fiction. Coming-of-Age.
Ages: 12-15
First Line: He rode into our valley in the summer of ’89.

In the year of 1889 young Bob Starrett’s parents, Joe and Marian, take on a well-dressed drifter as a farmhand. Shane’s past is unknown but he quickly becomes a loyal friend to the Starretts and they need his help when local cattleman Luke Fletcher decides he’s had enough of all the new homesteaders crowding “his” range. Joe refuses to sell out and encourages his neighbours to stand strong, at which point Fletcher decides to intimidate the Starretts into leaving town, taking more and more violent steps to acquire the homesteaders’ land. The settlement is so small they don’t even have a sheriff to defend them and suddenly Shane’s hidden talent for violence is the only thing protecting the Starretts from losing everything they’ve worked so hard to build.

https://i0.wp.com/d.gr-assets.com/authors/1342979492p5/150701.jpg — Jack Schaefer.

Shane is a classic western of the old unreformed school. Published originally in slightly shortened form in Argosy magazine in 1946, it appeared in book form in 1949 and was an instant hit, securing its place in the “western” canon and (although far less known today) it has remained in print ever since. Jack Schaefer had never been out west at this point in his life, but he had been to Oberlin College and could write reasonably well. All westerns are myth, Shane is just more appreciative of that fact. Everything from the gunslinger to the family to the land – and the hulking stump disfiguring it – is a part of Schaefer’s grandiose myth of the west.

So Shane arrives, riding a lone trail out of a closed and guarded past, and immediately takes over the entire novel. He’s a marvelous creation: courteous, fastidious, tense, always alert. His first action after going from guest to hired hand is to commandeer father Joe Starrett’s place at the table. Joe lets it pass without comment but Bob is puzzled at first. I could not see any reason for the shift until the first time one of our homestead neighbors knocked on the door while we were eating and came straight on in as most of them usually did. Then I suddenly realized that Shane was sitting opposite the door where he could directly confront anyone coming through it.

https://cdn0.wideopencountry.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/shane.jpg — Shane from the 1953 movie does not appear to dress in black, wrecking the novel’s fundamental image. Hollywood….

Shane is calm and controlled and he knows a lot about guns but never carries one. His background is murky but it’s also not really the driving mystery of the novel – this is not a soap opera where Shane’s dark past literally blows into town as an outlaw with a grudge or a lost love from back east, and indeed the one person in town who recognises Shane packs and leaves immediately, with no explanation ever given. Shane’s past is never brought to light and it doesn’t have to be because it’s fairly obvious that he’s marked as different – everyone can sense he’s a dangerous man, one with a talent for violence. He might have good manners and make a good farmhand but he’s outside of civilization and can’t just cozy his way back in; indeed the very thing that separates him from the farmers and shopkeepers of civilization is imperative to its defense. This cements Shane as a tragic figure, even if Bob is too young to really understand why.

To Bob, Shane’s simply a child’s hero, who knew what would please a boy, including letting Bob sneak into town with him when there could be trouble lying in wait:

I was afraid father would stop me, so I waited till Shane was driving out of the lane. I ducked behind the barn, around the end of the corral, and hopped into the wagon going past. As I did, I saw the cowboy across the river spin his horse and ride rapidly off in the direction of the ranch-house.
Shane saw it, too, and it seemed to give him a grim amusement. He reached backwards and hauled me over the seat and set me beside him.
“You Starretts like to mix into things.” For a moment I thought he might send me back. Instead he grinned at me. “I’ll buy you a jackknife when we hit town.”

The story isn’t about Bob or his coming-of-age, and as such it wouldn’t be considered a YA novel by modern standards, but since the market didn’t “exist” back then, I imagine a lot of kids in the 50s would have read this bestseller without any problem. Even though Bob’s role is limited to observer, he is quite important to the novel’s tone. I’ve read westerns by some of the bigger names of this time period – Zane Grey, Max Brand – and they could have done with a humble narrator to connect their taciturn wanderers with the common run of humanity. The boy’s innocence turns Shane from a mere action novel into one of men and the nature of violence – the need for steel in a civilized world.

https://thewesterncornerofthecastle.home.blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/e9778-shane-1.jpg — Frankly, this is more how I pictured Shane. Jack Palance for the win.

Speaking of action, this is definitely a slow burn, with no violence at all until chapter 7, page 60, and with a major portion of the first chapters devoted to an epic of stump-removal that is really not as interesting as Schaefer seems to think it is. However, the back half of Shane is filled with brawls and gunfire, and Schaefer is a dab hand at concise, easy-to-picture action. I counted only two paragraphs that fell back on the cliched vagary of a blur of movement. The rest is very clear and unmistakable in what exactly is happening when. For example, Joe Starrett’s transformation into a furious Hercules when Fletcher’s men gang up on Shane and have him pinned:

I never thought he could move so fast. He was on them before they even knew he was in the room. He hurtled into Morgan with ruthless force, sending that huge man reeling across the room. He reached out one broad hand and grabbed Curly by the shoulder and you could see the fingers sink into the flesh. He took hold of Curly’s belt with the other hand and ripped him loose from Shane and his own shirt shredded down the back and the great muscles there knotted and bulged as he lifted Curly right up over his head and hurled the threshing body from him. Curly spun through the air, his limbs waving wildly, and crashed on the top of a table way over by the wall. It cracked under him, collapsing in splintered pieces, and the man and the wreckage smacked against the wall. Curly tried to rise, pushing himself with hands on the floor, and fell back and was still.

See the source image — Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1912.

Now, this is definitely glamorized violence and some parents don’t want their kids exposed to that kind of thing, so you probably already know whether Shane is something you want in the family library. I’d put it in the same category with Tarzan of the Apes or even the original Conan the Barbarian stories, as portraits of an idealized masculinity, fiercesome yet just. Given the times we live in, current culture is far more interested in deconstructing or parodying masculine traits, or saying that these traits only look good on girls. Shane, at a certain age, is perfect light reading for boys, providing a piece of the needed counterweight to the culture they are now steeped in 24/7. Shane is not a billionaire playboy or similar juvenile power trip fantasy. He doesn’t degrade women and he retains his personal dignity in all situations. Nor does he preach pacifism only to hypocritically embrace violence at the last second; instead, he is committed to his purpose of saving the Starretts from the beginning, retaliating as soon as the cattlemen cross the line from verbal intimidation to physical harm. The traits Shane exhibits are those of classic heroes and they are shown in a healthy light that is increasingly hard to find in modern representations, where masculinity is all about ego, brute force and cluelessness. In consequence, I give it high marks and advise its inclusion on a young man’s reading list.

Parental Guide square ahead, with spoilers.

Shane and Mrs. Starrett fall in love over the course of the story, but they are unwilling to even speak on the subject until the night of Shane’s departure. Joe isn’t an idiot and is more aware of the situation than Bob is, even seeming to accept the idea that if he gets killed Shane would probably do a better job of protecting the family than he could. His comment to this effect is seemingly what spurs Shane to pack his things and take up his gun-slinging ways again. This subplot exists seemingly to drive home the loneliness of Shane’s life, as his continued presence on the farm would only harm those he cares for and risks his life defending.

Violence: Two fistfights, of which my earlier quote should help provide the tenor. Two gunfights which, in a nod to reality, involve simply drawing faster, Leone-style, rather than High Noon duck-and-dodge shootouts. And the room rocked in the sudden blur of action indistinct in its incredible swiftness and the roar of their guns was a single sustained blast. And Shane stood, solid on his feet as a rooted oak, and Wilson swayed, his right arm hanging useless, blood beginning to show in a small stream from under the sleeve over the hand, the gun slipping from the numbing fingers. These scenes are short, but they are what the entire book is building towards.

The villains might say “hell” occasionally, but Joe Starrett speaks only in a steady stream of “by Godfrey’s.” One line of bad movie innuendo spoken by soon-to-be-dead Wilson: “You wouldn’t like someone else to be enjoying this place of yours–and that woman there in the window,” regarding Mrs. Starrett.

Values: If you uphold the Second Amendment, this is your kind of book, as Shane tells Bob that “a gun is just a tool. No better and no worse than any other tool, a shovel–or an axe or a saddle or a stove or anything. Think of it always that way. A gun is as good–and as bad–as the man who carries it.”

Land is identity, to be prized, not given away without a fight. This is not a deconstructed western. Man’s capacity to conquer the elements is given its ode through the Epic of the Stump. A worthy cause justifies violence and the show of power. A beating can improve a man’s character – young Chris (one of Fletcher’s boys) gets his arm broken by Shane and goes straight as a result. There’s poetry in the violence and a joy of being alive and released from long discipline and answering the urge in mind and body.

Role Models: I think I’ve covered that aspect thoroughly enough already. A boy’s hero and an unbreakable family unit.

Educational Properties: The clash of cattleman and farmer – life, business and economic reality in the old west. Towns, how they sprang up, thrived and sometimes perished overnight. There’s a lot of real history mixed up with the western and that’s well worth exploring.

End of Guide.

Jack Schaefer did move out west eventually, settling in Santa Fe and writing material that he had more experience with. He stuck to westerns for all the Shane fans, and I don’t plan on pursuing any of them as I expect they fall well outside the purview of this blog. However, he also won a 1961 Newbery Honor for a book called Old Ramon, and I’ll be keeping my eyes out for that one.

Up Next: No coy clues this time. It’s Charlotte’s Web, everyone.

The Western Corner of the Castle

Category: Adventure

The Prince and the Pauper – Mark Twain

Stormy, Misty’s Foal – Marguerite Henry

The Midnight Fox – Betsy Byars

The Magic Snow Bird and Other Stories – Enid Blyton

Misty of Chincoteague – Marguerite Henry

Mystery: Tom Sawyer, Detective

Adventure: Tom Sawyer Abroad

Adventure Novels: Around the World in Eighty Days

Adventure Novels: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventure Novels: Shane