Fiction lives largely through its characters. Fine writing, closely detailed social observations, the presentation of complex moral dilemmas or heartbreaking love affairs—any graduate of a college writing program can manage these. But to bring to blazing life a Sherlock Holmes or Emma Bovary, a Raskolnikov or Lorelei Lee, requires special genius and a lot of luck.
First published in 1883, Robert Louis Stevenson's highly cinematic first novel, “Treasure Island,” is set in the mid-18th century and focuses on a rough-drawn map and the search for a fortune in hidden pirate gold. It also celebrates villainy or, more accurately, grit and defiance in the face of adversity. William Blake once said that in “Paradise Lost” Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it. In contrast, Stevenson is of the Devil's party and revels in it.
Long John Silver and his fellow pirates may be murderers and mutineers, but there's no banality to their evil; they are magnificently, irresistibly alive—and scary. Still, all of them today would be described as the walking wounded: Silver has lost his leg and uses a crutch, Black Dog lacks two of his fingers, the terrifying Pew is blind, Billy Bones suffers from alcoholism, and Ben Gunn appears half-crazed from being marooned on a desert island, albeit clever enough to outwit his old shipmates. These hard, determined men can't be stopped or even slowed down by anything short of death. Though stabbed and weak from loss of blood, Israel Hands painfully, laboriously climbs a mast in his attempt to kill young Jim Hawkins. Not surprisingly, these audacious cutthroats all apprenticed under the titanic, Nietzschean Captain Flint, who murdered six of his own crew to ensure that nobody would know the location of his buried riches and who, on his deathbed, repeatedly demanded rum and more rum.
Even though we can hardly approve of such ruthless “gentlemen of fortune,” neither can we withhold admiration for their undaunted fortitude. They refuse to give in to self-pity or to allow their deficits to hamper them. In fact, they exemplify the same unshakable resolve immortalized in William Ernest Henley's poem “Invictus”: “In the fell clutch of circumstance/ I have not winced nor cried aloud.... / My head is bloody, but unbowed.... / I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.” Stevenson actually based Long John Silver on Henley, who lost a leg to tuberculosis but whose spirit remained indomitable. Remember, too, that Stevenson himself—plagued by ill-health throughout his life and dead at 44—was so physically weak when working on the novel that he wrote most of it in bed. “Treasure Island” is a sick man's daydream of roistering toughness and boundless energy.
Unlike its larger-than-life villains, the book's “good” characters come across as mere children. Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey embark on the search for Flint's gold as if it were a jolly game. Captain Smollett is capable, but weakly assents to his naïve employers' foolish decisions. In the end, we know that “Treasure Island” is a romance because in real life these innocents wouldn't stand a chance against battle-tested buccaneers.
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