The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

This is Mark Twain's second book in the Tom Sawyer series and was published in 1884 after a prolonged period of writing. Very different in nature to the previous book, which was a boyish adventure about bandits and treasure, Huck Finn is a dark and deeply unsettling tale about the evils of human nature and society. Oppressed by his guardians attempts to civilise him and his drunken father's violent antics, fourteen year old Huck fakes his own death and escapes down the Mississippi on a raft. He teams up with a runaway black slave called Jim, and together they embark on a series of adventures, experiencing hijinks and misfortunes along the way. Huck is forced to choose between doing the right thing by law, which is handing Jim over for capture, and the right thing morally, by aiding his escape. It is largely a comedic satire about a deep south society no longer in existence, pointing a finger of ridicule at the blunderings of hicks and vagrants, whilst deploring the cruelty humans inflict upon one another.

The book can be hard going at first, as it's written first person in the various dialects of the southern accents. Huck and his neighbours use a country drawl whilst Jim and the other slaves are practically unintelligible to some readers. Fortunately it all made perfect sense to me and didn't lessen my enjoyment of the story. Huck Finn has often been described as the greatest American novel ever written and it does succeed in capturing that essence and heart of the frontier, simultaneously paving the way for American modernism and characterising all that was wrong with clinging onto bygone belief systems and outdated customs. The racism at the core of the tale is strangely enough not the prime focus, this seems to be more the dissonance between nature and society, impulse and decorum. I fully appreciated all that the plot had to offer, up until the last section set on the Phelps' farm where Tom Sawyer re-emerges. Things go drastically downhill at this point, with a protracted and tedious cop-out ending. A very disappointing end to what could have been an absolute masterpiece.

Rating: 3/5