Adventure classics – ‘We’ve met the beast and he is us’

Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

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Living without grownups isn’t turning out to be as much fun as the marooned schoolboys of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies had first imagined. After crash landing on an uninhabited tropical island, 12-year-old Ralph at first turns cartwheels as the “delight of a realized ambition” overcomes him: the ambition of being free of adult supervision.

But as the weeks pass, and no ship arrives to rescue the boys, delight turns to horror. Ralph is elected chief of the boys, but he has a vicious rival in Jack Merridew, who’s more interested in trying to hunt the island’s wild pigs than in tending a signal fire. The youngsters are homesick, and often physically ill as well from their diet of fruit from the island’s trees. Ralph’s best friend Piggy’s glasses have been broken in a squabble over relighting the neglected signal fire. And then there’s the strange being the youngest boys believe haunts the island, the Beast. Because although the older boys, Ralph and Piggy and Jack, deride the fears of the “littluns,” they secretly fear the island’s dark loneliness. Can the Beast be the reason things are falling apart in their microcosm of society?

And the boys begin to long for the return of the grownups.

“‘Grownups know things,’ said Piggy. ‘They ain’t afraid of the dark. They’d meet and have tea and discuss. Then things ‘ud be all right. . . .’”

“If only (the grownups) could get a message to us,” Ralph “If only they could send us. . . a sign or something.”

That same night, while Ralph and his friends sleep, a sign does come. “There was a sudden bright explosion and corkscrew trail across the sky; then darkness again and stars,” Golding writes. “There was a speck above the island, a figure dropping swiftly beneath a parachute, a figure that hung with dangling limbs.”

This sign, a dead pilot from an air battle fought high over the island, crashes onto the mountainous island. His parachute tangles in the trees whose movements in the wind give him a false semblance of life, a sign of the “beast” the boys try to propitiate with an offering from their first successful hunt – the head of a pig.

Only shy, epileptic Simon realizes the true nature of this “beast” – that it is only a pathetic corpse whose presence belies all their trust in the wisdom and infallibility of “grownups.” But before he can convey his epiphany to the rest, he encounters the fly-encrusted head of the dead pig, and meets the true Beast, the Lord of the Flies.

“‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. . . . ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why things are what they are. . . so don’t try to escape!”

Simon arrives back at the boys’ camp at night, during a sudden storm. In his absence, Jack has instigated a blood-based cult to cement his coup over Ralph’s leadership and as the boys scream “Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!” Simon stumbles unrecognized into their midst.

“The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill.” And in the small post-apocalyptic world of the island, the voice of reason dies, the boys fall in a spiritual decay as certain as the physical decay of the pilot’s body, and the Lord of the Flies claims his own.

(Can things possibly get any worse? Next Friday Adventure classics concludes a September of young adventures with the final chapter of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.)

Adventure classics -- Castaways’ peaceable kingdom

The Swiss Family Robinson

by Johan David Wyss

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Why has it taken this long for me to realize how much I love castaway narratives? There’s something incredibly satisfying in reading about human beings surviving on their brains and gut. And in the case of Swiss pastor Johan David Wyss’s version, The Swiss Family Robinson, surviving on their hearts.

Because family love and cooperation trump all in this beguiling tale based on the stories Wyss told to his children before gathering the narratives into book form in 1812. The love between father and children, and, uniquely for such narratives, husband and wife, mother and children shines through the now somewhat antiquated language of early translations. (Yes, there’s a feisty, shipwrecked mom in the story, who stands up to her husband when she disapproves of his ideas, dons sailor’s trousers when her skirts become a hindrance, is handy with a gun and able to cook anything from flamingo to kangaroo.)

Jules Verne admired Wyss and hoped to out-Robinson him with his own castaway tale, The Mysterious Island. To do that, he dropped his own crew of castaways from a balloon onto an island filled with almost as improbable a menagerie of beasts and botanicals as Wyss. But he couldn’t come near Wyss’s tale for sheer loveableness.

Both Verne and Wyss’s stories hark back to the grandfather of all castaway stories, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In fact, the Swiss family’s surname is never revealed. The “Robinson” in the title of Wyss’s book merely serves to link them to the original doughty castaway.

I’ve never understood why Defoe’s version is shelved among children’s books. The early eighteenth century text is full of Crusoe’s spiritual wrestling with the grimly Calvinistic version of Christianity Defoe subscribed to. Fast forward a hundred years and Wyss, although still deeply religious, preaches only gently to his family of rowdy kids. He’s as much a loving parent entertaining his children with wild adventure tales as he is a spiritual advisor.

The story begins a shipwreck. (Defoe’s tale began with a history of the entire Crusoe family, the likes of which Wyss mercifully spares us.) The family¾ father William, mother Elizabeth, and their four sons, Fritz, Ernest, Jack and Franz¾ are sailing through the South Pacific bent on settling in Australia. Abandoned by the crew of their foundering ship, they sustain their courage through prayer and, sensibly, a meal and preparation of makeshift life jackets.

Escaping onto a deserted island, they find the only survivors are themselves, the excellent hounds of the ship’s captain (Verne remembered this when adding a helpful dog to his story) and a host of livestock. But their ship was laden with an incredible array of necessities for their anticipated destination. As industrious as they are lucky, they soon have a multilevel treehouse any kid would envy, a series of improbable domesticated wild animals including a buffalo (which seems to be a bison miraculously transported from the northern to southern hemispheres), but no books. (Yay, school’s out for the duration!)

What is there to fear? Angry natives? No. Pirates? No. Volcanoes, hurricanes, sharks? No, no and no. The worst possibility, in fact, is that a well-meaning rescuer will arrive to take them away from their peaceable kingdom. Even the arrival of another castaway, this one a girl, can’t drive a wedge in their familial happiness.

If you want to read a castaway narrative to your kids, make it this one. Or just pretend it’s for your kids and read it for yourself. It’s widely available, including free downloads from Project Gutenberg,
www.gutenberg.org/.

(Next Wednesday, alas, there’s no peace at the river as Adventure classics continues a September of young heroes with Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.)

Adventure classics -- The hero who returns from the depths

The Mysterious Island

by Jules Verne

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In last week’s post about the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania, submariners were the villains. This week, the most famous submarine captain of all is the hero. I’m talking about Captain Nemo, of course, Jules Verne’s most famous hero.

Nemo first made his appearance in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Published in 1870, Twenty Thousand Leagues purports to describe the adventures of a renegade sea captain and his futuristic submarine, the Nautilus, beginning with its first appearance in 1866. The story ended with the disappearance of the Nautilus and Nemo in a gigantic maelstrom.

In a manner similar to the later disappearance of fellow Victorian superhero, Sherlock Holmes, readers are left to assume Nemo has died. But Holmes conveniently left no corpse, allowing his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, freedom resurrect the detective.

In Verne’s case, the resurrection of popular hero Nemo occurred before he had even vanished. Blame the chronological craziness it on the serialization of novels in the late nineteenth century.

Verne opens The Mysterious Island with some of the most dramatic dialogue ever written: “Are we rising? No! Quite the reverse! We’re sinking! Worse than that, Mr. Cyrus! We’re falling!” and continues in similar fashion for half a page.

(If the dialogue in your version of The Mysterious Island doesn’t read this urgently, pick up Jordan Stump’s 2001 English translation for the Modern Library Edition, which moves the story at breakneck speed.)

The frantic characters are five escaped Union prisoners marooned in Richmond, Virginia, in March 1865, near the end of the Civil War. Not realizing the Confederacy will fall in
less than a month, the five -- engineer and U.S. Army veteran Cyrus Smith, his freed slave Neb; journalist Gideon Spillett, sailor Bonaventure Pencroft and his young ward Harbert, escape in a Confederate spy balloon, only to blown by a hurricane halfway around the globe, on the deserted South Pacific island they name Lincoln Island. (Translator Stump anglicizes some names while restoring others of Verne’s originals.)

Determined to write a story about castaways more ingenious than previous versions by Daniel Defoe or Johann Wyss, Verne set his American heroes adrift in a balloon. I can imagine his fiendish glee as he deprives the castaways of the usual wrecked ship to salvage for their everyday needs. By the time they crash on that South Pacific island, they have nothing but the clothes on their backs, their watches, a dog, and a single match. Which shortly goes out.

Desperate as their situation was, there was an unseen benefactor watching over them, a benefactor sensed but unseen until nearly the end of the book.

As his story spooled through the newspaper editions, did Verne toy with other possible benefactors before settling on Captain Nemo? Did his publisher or his reading public clamor for more about the enigmatic captain? At any rate, Verne reveals Nemo as the Americans’ unseen benefactor near the end of the book. Described as an elderly man who has been on the run for decades (although remember, he only made his first appearance in 1866, the year after the balloon castaways took flight), Nemo dies at last, sealed in the tomb of the sunken Nautilus.

Did Verne hope his readers had forgotten the chronology of Nemo’s earlier tale? Not to worry -- the ingenious story doesn’t suffer in the least from such discrepancies.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics begins a September of young adventurers with Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson.)