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Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

dawn dordogne

Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s’pose you’d done a right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad – I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Sometime in the Spring I downloaded a selection of out of copyright books onto my e-reader. A few of these books I have started but got no further than a few pages. They have a foreboding stodginess. They’re weighted down with words that my e-reader’s inbuilt dictionary can’t handle. Others have shocked me. Who knew Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis would be readable but boring? I was expecting difficult but profound. And who expected that Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, would actually turn out to be My Fair Lady and have an extensive but entertaining afterword that was mostly about the relationship between Professor Higgins and his mother, Mrs Higgins. I think I may well have been more delighted by the afterword than by the play itself.

Which just goes to show how many ideas I have about books before I’ve read them. I know names of authors and titles of books and think I know whether or not I’m going to like them before I begin reading. Quite often, I am wrong.

I liked The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn more than I’d imagined. I assume The Adventures of Tom Sawyer comes first, and I’m sure when I’m next doing a binge download of the classics I shall take it, but what I had downloaded was dear Huckleberry Finn.

At first, the language caught me as a little coarse. Wading through the dialogue slowed down my reading. Finn’s speech soon showed its rhythm, but throughout the book I found his friend, Jim, to have a more challenging dialect. This didn’t stop me enjoying the story. If anything it added the flavour that made Finn’s character. His philosophising had a clarity to it that I couldn’t help but adore, even if I found myself shaking my head at some of his conclusions. And Finn’s arguments with Jim reminded me of Simba, Timon and Pumbaa discussing the composition of the stars.

In the story, each mini adventure unfolds and then concludes with Finn narrowly avoiding both great fortune and misfortune. Whilst I found the curious characters and mannerisms of Finn’s America entertaining, it is the the moment after the mayhem that I love the most. This is when Finn arrives back on his raft, breathes a sigh of relief and reflects on how good it feels to be free. A gift he knows to appreciate. I love how Mark Twain managed to give this emotion, in Finn’s voice, a beautiful honest elegance .

Each morning I open my bedroom door and look across the vegetable garden. Beyond are fields and woodland. The sun lays low in the sky, pale and wrapped in mist. Here, before I join the chaos of the family breakfast, Finn’s quiet moments on the riverside seem close by.