Book Review - James by Percival Everett
Both Booker and Pulitzer nominated, National book award winner, and with plenty of great reviews behind it, I thought it about time I gave ‘James’ by Percival Everett. A work of historical fiction, based on ‘Huckleberry Finn’ I was intrigued and eager to give this a go.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Firstly, before I read ‘James’ by Percival Everett I thought about reading ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ first, but ultimately I decided not to. I’m in the midst of an interminable reading slump and I don’t need another book on the TBR pile. Perhaps I will get around to Mark Twain’s classic at a later date.
Maybe someone will come along in the comments below and post that you absolutely need to have read that text first, but I didn't so the review won’t compare the two in detail. I do know the broad details of the Twain book so I wasn’t going in completely blind.
Slavery
The book is based on Huck’s adventures, only told this time by black slave James. When he hears that he’s going to be sold at auction, he decides to make a run for it, and ends up on the Mississippi with Huck.
What I will say is that when I finished this book it was hard to believe it was actually 300 pages long, because it absolutely zipped along. But for all it’s extreme readability, it’s also a tough read, as there’s brutality and racism throughout, ad you’d imagine.
The idea of the black slave characters being able to switch between their submissive slang when white people are around, to their elegant English when alone, was certainly an interesting one. The enslavers have no idea of the rich interior monologue that James has.
How James came to be well versed on Voltaire and Kierkegaard is only touched upon, but in the spirit of the book, I mostly ignored such quibbles. I get that the oppressors seen the slaves as dumb. Appearing stupid around their captors is certainly a survival skill they would have learnt early.
Summary
Honestly, I liked this well enough but I wasn’t raving about it either. It’s hard for me to put my finger on why I didn’t completely love this but I’ll do my best.
I did get swept away by the narrative but it never lingered with me. Maybe the lack of realism at times irked me more than I thought. And maybe I need to have read the text it’s based on to have a more informed opinion. But this is my opinion at this moment in time. There’s also a plot twist that I certainly didn’t see coming that I found a bit jarring for some reason. The ending also felt a wee bit abrupt.
I suppose if you are going to compare it to another book, it might be ‘Demon Copperhead’ by Barbara Kingsolver, though that was an updating of a classic for the modern, whereas this is set in the same period but told from another perspective.
For all that, I did enjoy this. It’s a cracking read, thought provoking and interesting, and there are momments of humour in it which I really wasn’t expecting. It’s an exuberant piece of storytelling, worthy of the praise it’s receiving and I’m glad its doing so well. There’ll definitely be a film adaptation of this.
315 Pages
Kindle Edition Published March 26 2024 by Mantle