James by Percival Everett – A Pencil is Sharper than the Sword
James by Percival Everett is a 2024 retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The setting is the Mississippi Valley in the 1830s. Young Huck fakes his own death to escape his violent, drunken father, meets up with a runaway slave called Jim and sails down the Mississippi with him on an improvised raft in search of freedom. This time we hear the story from Jim’s point of view.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was very much about a natural, free, frontier existence colliding with a more settled manner of living. Huck is part feral child, part school boy. James in many ways covers the same ambivalent territory. Now seeing things from Jim’s perspective, we learn that Jim, is a secret intellectual. He has been in the habit of sneaking into libraries and reading. He disguises the unacceptable truth of his education by speaking in slave vernacular and pretending to be highly superstitious.
In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, literature is an enigmatic idea, sometimes representing the development of humanity, sometimes a symbol of its backsliding from original innocence. In James, literature is more the representation of social struggle. Just as money and power are reserved by one dominant group, so too is learning and reading. In some ways books are just the trappings of success, like fine clothes and big houses. The way to fight back is to grab a pencil and start making your own account, which is what Jim does at huge personal risk. However, as James continues, there is a feeling that literature is not merely a means of waging cultural warfare. There is a potential for writing to be something that unites rather than divides. There are so many occasions in the book when the bitter dividing lines of black and white merge into one another. At one point Jim joins a touring minstrel singing group of white men in black makeup, Jim strikes up a friendship with Norman, who has one white and one black parent. But Norman looks white, acts white but sees himself as black. So, while James is about cultural struggle, it’s also an exploration of grey areas, where divisions are illusory.
Rewrites of famous novels tend to make me nervous. It takes some confidence to put yourself up against a classic author and expect to look good. But James is an excellent read, very funny in parts, unflinching and thought provoking. I have to admit, in straight-forward reading pleasure terms, to enjoying this book more than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I read directly after James. Bravo.
