I tried to read Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe some years ago, but, even though I know to be patient with older classics, I was bored to tears and never finished it. When I listened to The Moonstone recently, one of the characters in it referred to Robinson Crusoe quite a bit, and I thought, that’s it, I have got to finally read this thing. 🙂 I did not find it hard at all to get into this time. I think listening to an audiobook, read by David Warner’s easy-on-the-ears voice, helped immensely. I read parts in the online version on Project Gutenberg.

All I knew about the story was that Crusoe went off to sea in rebellion to his father’s wishes and somehow landed on a deserted island – deserted, he thought, until he had been there alone for some years and then was startled one day to find a single footprint that he knew wasn’t his, and that later he finds a black man whom he names Friday who becomes his servant. I didn’t realize that there were other adventures, both before and after his time on the island. In fact, the original (and very long) title to this book was The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. Quite a mouthful! These days it’s usually shortened to The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe or just Robinson Crusoe.

Wikipedia says this book, published in 1719, “is often credited as marking the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre,” and Sparknotes comments, “His focus on the actual conditions of everyday life and avoidance of the courtly and the heroic made Defoe a revolutionary in English literature and helped define the new genre of the novel. Stylistically, Defoe was a great innovator. Dispensing with the ornate style associated with the upper classes, Defoe used the simple, direct, fact-based style of the middle classes, which became the new standard for the English novel.”

The story opens with a bit of background of Crusoe’s family. “Being the third son of the family and not bred to any trade, my head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts.” His father wanted him to go into law, but Robinson “would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea.” His father earnestly admonished him that he had an opportunity for a comfortable life that had none of the problems of the very poor or very rich, and that he feared that if Robin persisted in his plans, it would come to no good end. Robin listened and waited a year, but in all that time could not make himself settle down to a profession. When he was nineteen, an opportunity arose for him to go out on a friend’s father’s ship, and “I consulted neither father nor mother any more, nor so much as sent them word of it; but leaving them to hear of it as they might, without asking God’s blessing or my father’s, without any consideration of circumstances or consequences,” he went.

His first journey is beset by storms and seasickness; his second journey ends with the ship being overtaken by pirates and his being made a slave.  After a while he escapes with a young boy named Xury, whom he makes his servant. They are rescued by the captain of a Portuguese ship, which takes him to Brazil. He sells Xury to the captain, obtains a plantation, and gets on fairly well for a number of years. Then he goes out to sea again with some others to obtain slaves, and that ship wrecks in a storm and Robinson lands, alone, on the island where he will spend the bulk of his life.

A great part of the story is taken up with his management on the island. He’s greatly afraid at first until he explores enough to find that he is alone and there doesn’t seem to be any kind of dangerous creatures. He fashions a raft and gets as much as he can off the ship before it’s broken to bits. Then he sets about making a shelter and planning how to ration his supplies and supplement them with what he can find on the island.

He calls it the “Island of Despair.” Many times he feels bad about his situation and prays to God for help, but he’s not really repentant yet. He’s like the stony ground in the parable of the sower in which something seems to be growing at first, but as the bedrock beneath has never been broken up, spiritual life doesn’t really take root. It’s not until some time later when he is very sick with ague that he comes to the end of himself and truly repents and turns to God. The book is surprisingly frank and orthodox about spiritual issues (surprising in the sense that a book this close to Biblical truth, and, in fact, somewhat didactic at times spiritually, has been so popular for hundreds of years. I’m glad – just surprised. Even the Sparknotes and Shmoop commentaries handle this aspect with being derogatory). When he gets discouraged, he makes up a list of the bad and the good: I’m alone on a desert island/at least I’m alive; I don’t have clothes/but I’m in a hot climate where I don’t need them, etc., and thus he is encouraged.

As first Robinson is in bare survival mode, but after a while his skills and possessions increase. He knows he must make provision for when his supplies from the ship run out. He throws out some leftover seed from a bag and is surprised when corn and barley grow from what he thought was just dust and feed remains, and he thanks Providence. He finds some birds which are good to eat, as well as turtles (which he cuts open to gather their eggs). He is pretty ingenious: one thing he lacked was any kind of iron. Once when cooking something in an earthenware pot he made, a piece of it broke off in the fire and became hardened. He began to try ways of heating his clay creations to make hardened, watertight vessels. Much of this and the rest of his work was trial and error, and many things took a great deal of time. Much of the middle section of the book is his dealing with these kinds of things and musing to himself.

He learns to be pretty content expect for the lack of companionship and sometimes feels like “my majesty the prince and lord of the whole island.” He even makes different areas to live, calling one his castle and another his “country house.”

But the pivotal moment comes when, after years on the island alone, he unexpectedly finds a man’s footprint in the sand. Further investigation leads to a site where cannibals have had a disgusting feast. Robinson determines to prepare for the next time they come to the island and kill them all, but then he wrestles with his conscience about whether that would be the right thing since they don’t know they are doing wrong. When they do come again, one of their prisoners breaks away. Robinson rescues him, names him Friday (that being the day of the week he found him), and makes him his servant.

This is one area that would offend modern sensibilities: Crusoe’s making Xury and servant and then selling him, and then making Friday a servant. Friday seems happy to be a servant in exchange for his life having been saved, but it seems arrogant and ungracious for one person to enslave another. It was the way of the world then, but Sparknotes makes this interesting analysis from Chapters 24-27:

The affectionate and loyal bond between Crusoe and Friday is a remarkable feature of this early novel. Indeed, it is striking that this tender friendship is depicted in an age when Europeans were engaged in the large-scale devastation of nonwhite populations across the globe. Even to represent a Native American with the individual characterization that Defoe gives Friday, much less as an individual with admirable traits, was an unprecedented move in English literature. But, in accordance with the Eurocentric attitude of the time, Defoe ensures that Friday is not Crusoe’s equal in the novel. He is clearly a servant and an inferior in rank, power, and respect. Nevertheless, when Crusoe describes his own “singular satisfaction in the fellow himself,” and says, “I began really to love the creature,” his emotional attachment seems sincere, even if we object to Crusoe’s treatment of Friday as a creature rather than a human being.

Robinson begins to teach Friday about God and Christianity, which Friday readily seems to accept.

What happens to Crusoe and Friday, what other visitors come to the island, and their other adventures off the island, I’ll leave for you to discover.

I’m glad to finally know the story of Robinson Crusoe. Have you read it? What did you think?

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins opens with a copy of a family paper from an unnamed source. The writer and his cousin, John Herncastle, were soldiers in the English battle for Seringapatam, India, in 1799.  The night before, stories were told by the men in the camp about various treasures to be found there, especially one called the moonstone, a large yellow diamond in the forehead of a statue of a moon god. The narrative tells of the history and legend of the stone, including three Brahmins who were supposed to keep it under constant watch and “certain disaster to the presumptuous mortal who laid hands on the sacred gem, and to all of his house and name who received it after him.” After the battle, the narrator and his cousin were charged with keeping the men from looting, but the narrator came across his cousin in a room with the diamond in his hand and two dead and one dying Indian at his feet. Though the narrator knew his cousin had stolen the diamond and killed the men, he could not prove it since he had not actually seen it done, so he didn’t bring it to the authorities. He did, however, turn his back on his cousin and has written this narrative to explain to the family why he has done so. The family in turn turned their back on John. The narrator concludes, “Although I attach no sort of credit to the fantastic Indian legend of the gem, I must acknowledge, before I conclude, that I am influenced by a certain superstition of my own in this matter. It is my conviction, or my delusion, no matter which, that crime brings its own fatality with it. I am not only persuaded of Herncastle’s guilt; I am even fanciful enough to believe that he will live to regret it, if he keeps the Diamond; and that others will live to regret taking it from him, if he gives the Diamond away.  ”

Fast forward 50 years or so, and John Herncastle tries to visit his sister and her daughter. His sister refuses to see him. He retreats, but leaves the diamond to his sister’s daughter, Rachel, in his will. Rachel’s birthday is coming up, and her cousin Franklin Blake has been assigned to bring the diamond to her for the occasion. Knowing the diamond’s history, he is unsure whether giving it to Rachel is the best thing to do, but after consulting with longtime friend and family butler, Gabriel Betteredge, they conclude that giving it to her is the only thing that can be done.

So Franklin gives her the diamond and fastens a little setting so she can wear it on her blouse. And who should crash the party but three traveling Indian jugglers, who can’t escape seeing the diamond.

The next morning, it’s discovered that the diamond is missing, stolen out of Rachel’s room. The Indians are the first suspected, but they have an alibi. Rachel is strangely uncommunicative about the incident.

The story continues from there with various people being suspected and cleared, various family secrets coming forth, and finally the mystery revealed.

The Moonstone is considered by many to be the first detective novel written (Poe wrote mysteries, but they were short stories) and contains many elements that soon became standards of the genre: bumbling local police, a famous detective with eccentricities, false leads, , the “least likely” suspect being the perpetrator, a plot twist, and the detective summing everything up and filling in the missing pieces at the end. The detective is oddly missing in the middle of the novel, but Franklin Blake pursues the mystery, and even Gabriel Betteredge confesses to getting “detective fever.”

The story is written as a series of accounts requested by Blake from various people of what they saw and experienced, so in a sense the reader gets to consider the evidence and play detective along the way.

I thought the story dragged a bit in the middle, when the accounts there seemed to have little to do with the diamond theft: later, however, the reason for those seemingly unrelated details comes to the forefront. Like Dickens, with whom Collins was friends and for whose magazine he wrote, there are no extraneous details or characters: everything fits into the plot, though it doesn’t always make sense until the end. The latter third of the book really picked up the action and I found it hard to put down at that point. The story was originally published monthly in Dickens’ magazine, and at the end of many chapters I thought Collins showed great skill in ending the chapter on a note that would makes readers breathless until the next installment. I was glad I didn’t have to wait a month between chapters! I also thought Collins shone in having characters reveal details about themselves unawares and seemingly contradicting what they meant to reveal about themselves..

The Moonstone and The Woman in White are considered the best of Collins’ novels. I had read the latter a couple of years ago and consequently wanted to read more of Collins, but shied away from this one because I wasn’t sure how much superstition about the stone would play a part in it. But that turned out to be a very minor part of the story, mainly contained in the first section about its history. As the first narrator said, ” crime brings its own fatality,” and the book mainly deals with the crimes along the way of the moonstone’s history.

Though I normally enjoy reading analysis in Sparknotes, I thought they were a little off in a couple of places concerning this book. Here they say the story is “a novel in which women don’t speak often and therefore do not have a distinctive presence.” But the women spoke quite often – one of the major narrators is a woman. And they assert that the moonstone is symbolic of Rachel’s femininity and virginity and the theft of it from her room symbolic of her “deflowering.” But I saw no reason to associate it as such, especially as she is not “deflowered” in the incident.

I enjoyed listening to the audiobook narrated by several and the perusing parts of the text at Project Gutenberg.

The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White tells the story of the boyhood of King Arthur. He has no idea he is descended from royal blood. He’s growing up in the family of Sir Ector in his castle near the Sauvage Forest in England. Arthur is known then as “The Wart” and knows he is not a “proper son,” but we’re not told yet where he came from and how he got there. Sir Ector’s son, Kay, is about the Wart’s age, and they take lessons together in everything from History to jousting and hawking. Kay’s destiny is to become a knight: the best that The Wart can hope for is to become Kay’s squire.

When Sir Ector decides the boys need a tutor, the Wart happens upon Merlin. Merlin is a magician who is moving through time backwards, which often confuses him as to whether something is about to happen or has already happened. He is an able tutor, but he gives more time to the Wart, telling him it’s best to learn from experience and therefore turning him into various creatures, like a fish, a snake, an ant, a bird, and a badger, and sending him into each creatures environment to interact with others.

The Wart feels bad that Kay doesn’t get any adventures and wants Merlin to turn him into something, but Merlin insists he can’t use that magic for Kay. But he does send them off on a trail in the forest which leads them to Robin Hood’s camp and an expedition to save prisoners from the fairy queen, Morgan la Fey.

The word that seems to stand out to me to describe the Wart as a boy is decent. It’s not that he’s brave because bravery is a good trait in itself, but in doing the right thing he has to exercise bravery, such as when he and Kay take their father’s prize hawk into the woods to hunt rabbits, and Kay mishandles the hawk, resulting in its flying into a tree and not coming back to them. Kay goes home, but the Wart stays all night alone in the forest to keep an eye on the hawk so they don’t lose it. He’s also thoughtful, merciful, humble, and kind.

The musical Camelot is based on White’s version of Arthur’s story, and once I saw an interview with Richard Harris, who played Arthur in the film version, in which he said that he played him as someone who has greatness thrust upon him, but Richard Burton, who played Arthur on stage, played him as someone born to greatness. I can see both elements here. He is born to greatness, but he doesn’t know it yet. But events like the climatic removing the sword from the stone are done, not with the desire to overcome the challenge and prove himself king, but to help someone. He discovers only later that the sword would only come out for the person destined to be king (having missed the conversation in which everyone else talks about it) and at first feels quite uncomfortable with Sir Ector and Kay treating him like a king.

The Wart’s various experiences with animals were not just to teach him about nature. According to various sources, they also served to teach him about various governments. The pike, for instance, who was the king of that particular body of water in which the Wart was learning to be a fish, had absolute power but was deceptive and cruel. A colony of ants, on the other hand, acted like mindless automatons working for the greater good, which some suggest is meant to portray Communism (oddly, the ants aren’t included in the version I listened to, but I saw them mentioned in other sources). Perhaps what he learns about governing from each of them is brought out in the later books, but in this one, the various lessons he learns from them come back to him as he tries to pull the sword out of the stone. For instance, when he was trying to learn to swim as a fish with fins instead of arms and a tail instead of legs, Merlin kept telling him to “put his back into it.” That as well as bits from his other experiences came back to him in that moment.

The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White was originally published in 1938 but eventually it was combined with other books about the legend of King Arthur in The Once and Future King in 1958. It underwent quite a bit of revision by the time the 1958 version was published, incorporating some material that White had wanted to include in a fifth book in the series. According to Wikipedia, stand-alone publications of the novel tend to use the first version while publications of all four books into The Once and Future King used the revised. According to the PDF accompanying the audiobook I listened to, this version uses elements of both.

This book reads like a fairy tale or a boy’s adventure story, but it’s not technically aimed at children. There are comic moments along with the adventures and lessons as well. It was the basis for the Disney movie by the same name, but, as usually happens, much was changed in the cartoon version. I understand that the rest of the legend gets darker as it progresses in the other books. I haven’t decided yet whether to read them.

As far as potential objectionable elements go, there’s the whole issue of Merlin being a wizard, the Wart being turned into other creatures, and a fight with a witch. If you allow fairy tales, these shouldn’t be a problem: when my kids were young, I avoided stories with witches, but at some point when they were older decided that fairy tale witches were different from the real thing and operated more as the antagonist in stories. But if you have a problem with that or think your children shouldn’t be exposed to that yet, then you’d want to avoid this book. There is also a good deal about evolution and a good bit of violence, though it’s not gratuitous nor overly descriptive. The one brief part I didn’t like was the flippant portrayal of God in one legend.

But when it comes to the adventures themselves and Arthur’s growth into the man and king he eventually became, I enjoyed the story quite a lot.This book ends not long after Arthur’s coronation, and I assume the next one picks up some time after that.