Review: Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

 

My last review was of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and I have now gone on to read an obvious Compare & Contrast novel, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). I was terribly disappointed, for two main reasons.

The novel is narrated by Huck as a series of scenes, more or less improbable. Though there are fine descriptions of the setting and insightful sketches of characters, the scenes don’t really add up to anything bigger and Huck develops less in sensibility than does Kim; it would be wrong to say that his character is static but it is pretty much full formed from the outset.

More importantly, I found the long drawn-out final scenes constructed out of Tom Sawyer’s fantasies almost unendurable. They aren’t funny and (reading anachronistically, perhaps) Tom comes across as the perfect sociopath, utterly oblivious of the consequences of his actions for those who love and care for him - Uncle, Aunt, Jim, Huck. That is one main reason why the phantasmagoria isn’t funny.

Huck is more it touch with reality but, overawed by Tom, goes along far too much with Tom’s fantasy schemes. They go on for many, many tedious pages and when it is Finally Revealed, death-bed confession style (chapter 42), what has really been going on, the narrative becomes perfunctory when it needs most not to be -  as if all that is now needed to close the narrative is for Aunt Sally to pronounce, “Well, that’s all right then”.

So far from being able to set up a serious Compare & Contrast, I throw up my hands and declare, No contest. Kim is a much better book.