Where Robinson Crusoe Figures It All Out

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked it a lot more than I expected to. This is a very entertaining book.

I see some people hate it, though. I get it--more on that later.

Considering this was published in 1719--and that Defoe was born in 1660--it's kind of amazing how entertaining and easy to read it is. That puts it much closer to Shakespeare than to Colleen Hoover or Tom Clancy. I've read novels a hundred years more recent that read older than this. (I've also read his Moll Flanders, back in college, and I kind of hated that, which is half the reason I didn't expect to like this. I approve of the theme of Moll Flanders, but the novel was very slow and hard to read, IMO.) Some people thought this was slow, but it worked for me.

I didn't like everything. There's a lot of baggage that comes with British dudes of that era, including overt racism, xenophobia, and casual misogyny, and the reader is forced to take a philosophic attitude toward the rhetoric emerging from those bigotries or give up reading it altogether. (To be fair, I have the same feeling while reading Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Old Testament of the Bible, or really pretty much anything written in a much earlier era when hating others was the norm. People used to accept a lot of horrible nonsense that did great harm to so many people. Still do, come to that.) Many things a modern audience abhors, like slavery in the New World, are treated as normal and just fine, actually, by the MC and, it would seem, by the author, which all makes sense from a historical perspective but is a bitter pill for the reader. Something that feels ironic to us in the present but wouldn't have seemed that way in the past was the fact that Crusoe becomes very religious, holding forth at length on Christian ideas, even while still accepting slavery and other injustices as perfectly natural, even becoming rich off of it. But that was mainstream thought on both accounts. Unfortunately.

However, Crusoe himself is made a slave for a portion of the novel, captured by Muslim pirates on the coast of Africa where he spends a few years, and though he wants to be free he never really complains about his lot or suggests his owners have done anything evil. He treats the condition as just bad luck, not a moral wrong that needs righted. So at least he's consistent.

An unavoidable flaw in the novel, IMO, is the nature of the story when told by a man all by himself. We get many chapters of pure narrative, unrelieved by dialogue. It still works okay, but it's less vibrant as a result. He needed Tom Hanks' volleyball to talk to or something. Friday and the other castaways don't show up until about 3/4 through.

All that aside, it's a packed story and feels pretty authentic, like something that might have happened. I wasn't interested in his religious awakening, which takes up pages here and there, but the way he managed to create a comfortable life for himself on an uninhabited island makes for good reading. Entertaining. Captivating, even.

I realized I had a very similar reaction to Treasure Island a few years ago--finding it surprisingly readable and entertaining when I thought it would be dry and too dated--and now I wonder if I need to read only old adventure novels that feature islands.....

The ending also underwhelms. Lots of loose ends get tied up, but I swear the final paragraph reads like the next-to-last page of a book. I was looking for a "happily ever after" sentence or something. These disappointments make what might have been a 5-star read pretty much a 4. But that's still good.

Recommended for adventure readers. My recommendation--get an old copy somewhere. Lean into the age of the story. I think you'll like it.

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