Another adventure story from an author that was one of my favorites. in my long ago youth. How does it fare in my old age?
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Prester John by John Buchan C
The answer to the lede question; not well. Not that there is anything really wrong with the book, for what it is. It is just not for me anymore, for a number of reasons. But before all of that, the premise.
The story opens with several kids in Scotland. While playing hooky from church they discover someone performing some sort of pagan ritual around a fire on a deserted beach at night. This someone turns out to be a visiting black clergyman. Discovered, he chases the boys, but they escape.
Fast forward ten years, and the narrator is offered the opportunity to make his fortune in South Africa as a merchant. On the trip down, he discovered the same clergyman, who, of course doesn't recognize him. And well, the rest of the story is about the fact that this clergyman, a spiritual descendent of a fabled Ethiopian emperor said to be Prester John, is the leader of a great African uprising, that, of course, must be suppressed. One desperate adventure after another ensues.
Buchan spent two years in South Africa as an aide to the British high commissioner, so he knew the setting and the people, and could described it, in great detail and in authentic terms. Unfortunately, many of those terms meant nothing to me. And then there is my usual problem of not being able to picture what is being described, so that a lot of the words describing the scenery and such was wasted on me. He also has pages and pages of rock climbing descriptions, which like battles, just confuse and bore me. He also has a lot of internal dialog, which I may've put up with in my youth, but I find tedious these days. I did a lot of skim reading in the last third of the book.
Part of the problem with this book and similar ones, is that I don't care about the fate of the English Empire. So when you have these heroes giving it their all to save it, I'm not really caring all that much. For example, in this case, if this great leader rose and led the Africans to toss out the European colonialist, I'm on their side. Laputa, the black clergyman and leader of the planned uprising is sort of an African Fu Manchu, sharing Fu Manchu's desire to overthrow European colonial rule. Time has made these fictional villains the heroes of these stories.
I will give Buchan credit; he treated the blacks with respect and sympathy for their plight. The Laputa was seen by the first person narrator of this story as a great and noble man, and the natives were not serotyped savages.
However, in the end, though there was fast paced danger and adventure, there were also long sections towards the end that read like history lessons, and for some reason my ebook reader would freeze every time I got to a certain page within the last ten pages of the end, so I never could read, or rather, skim to the end of the story. Oh well. I don't think I missed much.
I am probably not doing this book justice. John Buchan wrote a couple of my favorite stories and writes well. However, as in the case of Robert Lewis Stevenson, it seems that these old time adventure stories are no longer my forte.
This book is available for free on the Gutenberg Project.
No comments:
Post a Comment