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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