Imagining the Last Days of Robert Louis Stevenson: Alberto Manguel's Stevenson Under the Palm Trees
Written: Dec 05 '04 (Updated Dec 05 '04)
Product Rating:
Pros: Fleetfooted, economical, readable writing - and a truly compelling story.
Cons: ummm...
The Bottom Line: In which the author conjures a wonderful novella about a 19th Century writer into being, and digs it so much he has to write about it on Epinions.
plorentz's Full Review: Alberto Manguel - Stevenson Under The Palm Trees
A while back, on this very website, someone wrote a review of a book in which one of those crazy, crazy French philosophers posited the theory that 9/11 happened because on some collective, unconscious level, America (meaning Americans) wanted 9/11 to happen - that, rising out of the steaming mire of our hedonism, our culture of blissfully unaware consumption, gossip, and sin, we had not only empowered those nineteen men with frighteningly foreign-sounding names, but had possibly even conjured them into existence to carry out this deed, to create the kind of horrific spectacle that would redefine who we are as a nation for the next generation, for even the next century of our history. On some level, perhaps, after the botched election of 2000, we realized that elections don't really change anything - don't really unify people - the way a good catastrophe does, and somehow, we willed this particular catastrophe, and the murderous mob who perpetrated it, into being.
It's an interesting, if slightly (okay, more than slightly) lunatic, theory. But then again, given the vehement re-emergence of arbitrarily proscribed "Christian" values into public discourse in the last election cycle; given the nation's newfound fetish for optimism, unanimity and all things faith-based; and given the way in which 9/11 legitimized such boldly religious language in the governmental sphere, maybe that theory isn't so crazy after all.
Then again, the idea that the human imagination has an agenda - a will of its own, independent of the intellectual consciousness of its host mind, isn't really a new concept. I remember reading Robert Nathan's A Portrait of Jennie back in the seventh grade and loving its story about a struggling artist whose career is revived when he meets and falls in love with a woman who appears to have been projected onto his life like a hologram by his own imagination. And then, of course, there's Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", or "The Fall of the House of Usher", in which characters are driven to self-incrimination (the former) or self-destruction (the latter) by the subconscious machinations of their own minds. And there's that one story in the The Twilight Zone: The Movie about the boy who animated his whole world as if it were one big, ghastly Saturday morning cartoon.
And then, there's Robert Louis Stevenson's story "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde," in which the protagonist, with the noblest of intentions (pretensions?), taps into and ultimately unwittingly unleashes his own darkest imaginings, simply by drinking a potion.
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Stevenson himself (not to mention Stevenson's imagination) is at the heart of a new novella by Alberto Manguel, called Stevenson Under the Palm Trees. Set in the 1890's, on Stevenson's Samoan estate of Vailima, the story imagines the writer in the last days of his life, writing furiously of his native Scotland (perhaps knowing he'd never return there) in between long periods of infirmity, coughing up blood, weakened by consumption.
In the opening paragraphs, Stevenson meets a fellow Scotsman, a missionary and a zealot, a man who denounces fiction and claims to have never read anything the writer had produced, and who sees in Samoa, and in the South Pacific in general, little more than a bubbling cauldron of savagery and vice, voicing his disdain with a poetic flourish, "Here the heat softens the sinews, makes sin burst like flowers from the mud."
Though Stevenson is taken aback by the missionary, Mr. Baker, and his extreme and violently dismissive assessment of the native cultures of the islands, Baker also taps into Stevenson's consuming nostalgia for Edinburgh ("I go to sleep with its cold dampness in my nostrils, and I wake up with the smoke of its chimneys in my eyes"), and perhaps his own conflicted feeling for the islands:
He remembered his first years in Samoa - and the yard covered in fallen papayas, the bright yellow skin turning dark, the fruit opening its many folds and exposing its sensuous fleshy inside, smelling of saliva... a private and lewd spectacle.
Soon after meeting Mr. Baker, a wave of violent crime sweeps the nearby village of Apia, and Stevenson, well known and especially respected among the Samoans, who call him Tusitala (meaning "storyteller"), is baffled when he finds himself at the center of the villagers' accusations - and even more-so later, when Mr. Baker absolves Stevenson - even congratulates him - for the hideous, murderous crimes he's accused of.
Manguel's writing is nimble and economical. He doesn't often linger on long, florid descriptions of the landscape (as other writers setting a story on a tropical island might be wont to do), or cavernous soliloquies. Like Stevenson himself, his prose is almost puritanical in its sharp purposefulness, and every sentence is spent in revealing new facets of the story and its protagonist. Nothing feels wasted or extraneous; and for a book based on a historical literary figure, Manguel eschews empty research regurgitation - the book is remarkably (and refreshingly) short on fussy biographical details - and relies most heavily on the simple (or is it?) mystery at the heart of the story.
In so doing, Manguel not only creates a loving portrait of the writer as a middle-aged near-dead man, but also delivers an eminently readable story that falls somewhere between a Joseph Conrad-style colonial fable, and Stevenson's own study of good-evil duality in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" - a story that is as vibrant as it is relevant to our own historical moment. And though this book, illustrated with miniature prints of Stevenson's own wood-cuts, rewards one reader's knowledge of the real-life Stevenson's body of work, it doesn't punish another reader's ignorance. (This particular reader falls somewhere in the middle.) It's a little book full of wonders that beg to be discovered and re-discovered.
And it's begging me to discover and re-discover the work of Stevenson as well. On to The Master of Ballantrae...
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