I don’t think I am qualified to pen a full review for this book. Erewhon, the first of the good, literary reads for 2010 may emerge to have been a poor starting place. The Penguin edition I loaned from the public library contains a lengthy exposition, called an introduction, which I feel attempts to explain why Erewhon is a wonderful work of literature. I wasn’t sold.
Don’t get me wrong, it is remarkable; published in 1872 by Samuel Butler, at first anonymously and extremely successfully and later, foolishly perhaps, under his own name Erewhon has plenty of good points. The story of it’s publication is an curious one, Samuel Butler, a gentleman of independent means paid for the printing himself. He was bold, choosing to print a thousand copies when many first editions of the period ran to five hundred.
The opening passages are wonderful. Butler loved the landscape he described and he had a talent for capturing scale and detail in a gentle and persuasive way. I missed the landscapes for the rest of the book. If Butler had continued to describe Higg’s meanderings for the rest of the book I would personally have considered it the work of a master. It’s certainly comparable in quality and mood to Hardy’s heath in The Return of the Native.
Unfortunately as soon as Higg’s makes it past the crest of the last hill Butler moves from the terrain he loves to the apparently unfamiliar territory of interpersonal relationships and, ewww, love. These are the vehicles which Butler employs to communicate his ideas. I can’t fault the value attached to these ideas, nor the praise awarded to Butler, however late it’s arrival. It’s just not good reading anymore. Where the landscape was broad and full of details you wanted drawn courteously to your view the more philosphical elements expand in proportion until they obviate the tale itself.
Melville manages to conceal his whaling manual far more successfully and he certainly wasn’t appreciated the first time round. So too is my reaction to Erewhon. Even the names, such as Nosnibor and Senoj, felt lazy rather than allegorical and the constant references to Swift, the Empire, and Darwin, while intellectually satisfying stultified the script and ruined the prose. Ultimately this is a book that will lay unread for some time before I feel it deserves a re-reading.
Word of the day: Preterite-adjective1 – Grammar. noting a past action or state.2 – Archaic. bygone; past.
