The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
There are some rules to good writing that, if followed, tend to improve the reader’s experience and make the text seem more professional. Here are four examples that are often given to would-be writers in creative writing courses: (1) avoid adverbs, (2) avoid arbitrary changes to character point-of-view, (3) show-don’t-tell, (4) keep the ‘voice’ consistent.
Of course, rules are made to be broken. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer isn’t just good writing, it’s great writing. And yet, it breaks all of these rules, liberally and willfully. Twain’s literary dance is freestyle, the joyous rhythm of pure storytelling, which casts his narrator’s gaze across an expanse of adverbs, ‘author-splaining’ and character points-of-view as wide as the Mississippi River; all in a literary voice that changes – practically mid-sentence – from the Southern soprano of a Missouri boy to the often ironic tenor of a Yankee intellectual.
Never do you get the sense that Twain takes these literary liberties out of amateurish necessity, as cover for having been a bad student in dance class. He shows you just enough flashes of clever convention to assure you he could, if he wanted, write the whole thing in the elegant ballroom waltz of his (very English and much admired) literary predecessors: Dickens and Thackery.
But Twain’s ambition is not just to tell great stories; it is to tell great American stories. This Americanness, fresh and unburdened by convention, makes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer such an interesting read. The style is raw, because it must be raw, if it is to tell of a country still in its adolescence.
So too the eponymous central character. Tom is a flawed hero, a shabby scholar, and an undisciplined and ofttimes ungrateful nephew to his long-suffering Aunt Polly. His boyish play at piracy or robbery makes no moral distinction between good and evil, and in that, he displays not badness, but the amorality of those who have not yet tasted forbidden fruit. Equally, though, he is bursting with vital energy, courage and shows us throughout the book’s pages glimpses of the American Smooth of goodness, which his manly future self will one day master.
Most of all, Sawyer is free. Free to fight with or befriend other boys, to smoke, to break out of his house at midnight and explore distant river islands, unconventional ideas or “h’anted houses”. He is the Lord of the Dance.
In all of these ways, Tom Sawyer is not a character at all. He is the personification of this juvenile America. His Adventures, set purposefully at the dawn of the civil war, are an allegory for the rise of the United States as it shuffles forward in an awkward, uncharted yet somehow inevitable dance towards greatness.
No wonder this book has entranced generations of American readers. When they read Tom Sawyer’s Adventures, they are not just being told a story, they are being told their own nation’s biography.
Tom’s flaws are their flaws; Tom’s accomplishments are theirs too. And while this ‘Nation-State Tom’ has long since grown up, and the Republic of his manhood long since turned into an Empire frail with decay, still there remains something of that unconquerable American spirit that makes this book important.
As the rock band Rush sang of Tom Sawyer, a 105 years later:
“What you say about his company, is what you say about society.”
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Month: July 2025
The Age of Post-outrage
Upon hearing the news that the French journalist Natacha Rey was cleared by a French court of defamation in her case against Brigitte Macron, I was prompted to consider the consequences. To be clear, Rey’s claims about France’s first lady are spectacular and scandalous: that ‘she’ is in fact a man, most likely ‘her’ own brother Jean-Michel Trogneux, and therefore that Emmanuel Macron has been duping the French public and the world for nigh on a lifetime.
To be even more clear, I am agnostic on the substance of these charges. If true, I’m not even sure I attach all that much significance to it – I have always held that public figures should be judged for their public actions, not their private ones.
But none of that is the point, because my views are not what matters. What matters is that, under normal circumstances, this should be the Scandal of the Century. After all, it appears that the French voters were lied to. It also raises important questions about issues of state – who has what kompromat behind this salacious truth? Every newspaper, every television, every corner of the Assemblée Nationale should be abuzz with the controversy. Rightly or wrongly, pressure should be mounting on Brigitte Macron to take whatever simple and obvious steps could be taken to dispel this ‘fake news’. (Of course, if that were possible, one must assume her legal team would already have presented that evidence to the Court, and the defamation case would have been won against Rey).
So the real question is not whether Brigitte Macron is the same person as Jean-Michel Trogneux. It is why, in the face of relatively strong evidence that this might well be the case, widespread public awareness is not triggering any political immune response. We appear to have moved beyond the point where the system is capable of focusing enough outrage over issues that in the past, would have constituted major scandals.
Brigitte-gate is not even the most egregious example of this. Take the issue of lab leak. Whatever one still thinks about the Covid ‘vaxxines’, there is now virtually no serious disagreement – neither in scientific circles nor in the public at large – over how this virus came to be: Taxpayer-funded research networks, most likely linked to bioweapons programmes, gave money to a lab in Wuhan China to carry out gain-of-function research on a bat coronavirus. Some variant escaped and became SARS-2, spread across the planet and killed millions of people.
At this stage everyone knows this is what happened. But once again, the outrage is missing. Not only have the authors of this human catastrophe not been held to account, they are in fact still receiving taxpayer funding to carry out more of the same kind of deadly research. When I wrote a fictional book about a 2020 virus, back in 2015, this is the thing I got most wrong. In The Hydra, the outrage is a key theme – it topples governments, it motivates vast public interest, it moves the plot along, in fact. But I wrote that book at a time and in a world where tectonic events caused political earthquakes.
Nor is Covid even the most egregious example. We now live in a world where, not only do we passively watch a genocide unfold using weapons we have paid for, but when the author of that genocide nominates his principle weapons supplier and financial backer for a Nobel Peace Prize, barely anyone blinks. We sit dumbly and shrug as that same weapons supplier flatly tells us that although Ghislaine Maxwell was guilty of five counts of sex trafficking, she trafficked those children to no one at all. Kash Patel’s team didn’t even bother to edit the time stamps for the missing minute in the surveillance video tape of when Jeffrey Epstein was murdered (something I could have done with Adobe After Effects and a few days of careful work).
This kind of political numbness is not new. We saw a similar relationship between demos and veritas among the citizenry of the Soviet Union. A sort of cynical acceptance of the complete disconnect between official narratives and the quietly understood reality of everyday people, best encapsulated in the quip: They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.
It would be foolish to believe this is harmless. If nothing else, it speaks of a dangerous apathy among the masses that threatens the pluralist roots of our society, and breeds a culture of impunity among those in power. At its worst, it leaves us defenseless against corrosive influences. After all, biological creatures have immune responses for a reason – to warn us of when destructive pathogens have penetrated our systems, and then to mount a defense.
If we’re not careful, we might end up in a situation where one of the world’s nuclear powers is ruled by a man who, at age 39, sexually preyed on a 15 year old boy, while pretending to be a woman.
My review of Katherine Rundell’s ‘Superinfinite: the transformations of John Donne’
Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I first met poet John Donne there
Where in the century just gone
Every Irish not yet -man and -woman
Was made to memorise his sonnets:
On the bescribbled pages of Soundings,
That schoolbook English greatest hits
With tea stains on it.
I’ll confess he had on me the same effect
As on those his peer detractors
Who felt his metre to erratic,
His imagery too obtuse
For comfort or for ready use.
But sure, what more my story tell
Than of inner city youth?
In truth, no match for soaring
high-boned biographess
Katherine Rundell,
Whose dashing image squats a third
Of th’ rear cover sleeve in hardback.
(Her verso lips appear in colour lurid,
While Donne’s own recto, a pallid white and black)
What could I know of Souls
Like those that Donne proffered?
I who unlike her was never Fellow
Of All of them in Oxford?
With every syllable she writes she fools
Through heavy weight of accent,
Of chevron and three cinquefoils gules.
Yet ‘tis not her pride the deadly sin
That makes Kate’s lips so bright against the pages dun.
‘Tis ours – a sort of rabble pride,
We buy ‘cause we aspire
To transform two weeks in Croyde
Into something higher
Than pricey meals and a long slow, A-road, trafficked, need to stop and wee at the next station car ride.
She peddles for another sort of pride
As transformation
An inconstant poet fraud
Who sold his faith and stole his bride.
Why this odd fascination?
Because if Donne can use fine words to hide
His sins of greed, and sloth and lust,
So surely can our Kate use this pulpit of a type
To sell her stinking English upper crust
And all the sour history in it
As something more than what it is:
Sub-infinite.
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