The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I was not keen on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I don’t even know how many years go and I wasn’t keen on that either, so I’m not sure why I expected any different.  I’m sure I’ve read things about Mark Twain actually being a pretty cool chap, but I’m just too old to read a book about a teenage boy who takes pride in his ignorance.  I don’t like Huck.  He needs to do less messing about on the river and more learning to read.

To be fair, pretty much everyone in the novel is stupid.  An entire town seems to get taken in by the cons of a man pretending to be the (actually dead) Louis XVII.  Pro-tip, if someone tells you they’re the rightful King of France, they are lying.  Most of the novels characters are so stupid they’d fall for one of those Nigerian Prince e-mail scams.  Although, in many ways it’s reassuring to know that cons haven’t really changed in the last couple of hundred years or so.

As much as I keep banging on about it, it’s not really the characters’ stupidity that ruined this book for me- that’s only part of the picture.  The novel is written in about five different dialects of the Deep South.  Now, I have nothing against books written in local dialects.  Once you get your head around it, Trainspotting’s really enjoyable-if enjoyable is the right word for it.  But it makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so much bloody work.  The fact that no two people talk in quite the same way makes it so hard to adjust and then finally you get there only to find that they’re talking absolute shit anyway.  It was a true exercise in frustration for most of the book.

I wanted to like this book or find a way to engage with it.  The Black Lives Matter campaign shows that there are parts of the novel that are still horribly relevant today, but the frequent use of the n-word just made me feel a bit uncomfortable.  Yes, you have to judge it by contemporary standards and Huck is forward thinking by them; but he still does sound very racist.  And the dialect that Jim speaks in is cringeworthy.  All of this seems horribly at odds with Oxford World’s Classic’s ever wonderful (and in this case highly optimistic) explanatory notes that are deemed necessary the first time the n-word appears.  I mean, even if society weren’t institutionally racist, we’ve all heard Jay-Z songs.  That word does not need explaining to anyone old enough to read this book.

I will leave you on a positive note.  There was, in retrospect, one part of the book that I actually quite enjoyed.  One of the con men (the Duke, I think) is giving a Shakespearean recitation and it’s glorious.  The whole thing’s written in Shakespearean English so it’s by far the easiest part of the book to understand.  And it’s this brilliant mash-up between Hamlet, Macbeth and Richard III.  It’s utter nonsense, but it’s Twain writing clever nonsense; which I appreciate.  It includes the lines, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns, breaths forth contagion on the world.”  Which is kind of true, when you think about it…

I’ve now moved on to Empire of the Sun by J G Ballard.