A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in Easley Library Bookworms

Feb 22, 2008 Werner rated it did not like it

Shelves: classics, books-i-own, science-fiction

The reason I own a copy of this book is that Barb bought a cheap edition, and copies of several other classics from the same imprint, back in the 90s, to encourage our girls to read "classics." She and I tried reading it together early in this century (2001 is a guess); but she bailed on it early on. I finished it by myself, but only because it's a genre "classic," and at that time in my reading life, I was seriously trying to build up my knowledge of science fiction literature (long story!) Twa The reason I own a copy of this book is that Barb bought a cheap edition, and copies of several other classics from the same imprint, back in the 90s, to encourage our girls to read "classics." She and I tried reading it together early in this century (2001 is a guess); but she bailed on it early on. I finished it by myself, but only because it's a genre "classic," and at that time in my reading life, I was seriously trying to build up my knowledge of science fiction literature (long story!) Twain is a writer I officially count as a favorite, but I don't regard this novel as one of his better works.

Twain wasn't the only writer to use astral projection (here caused by a blow to the head) as a plot device; SF authors of that era were quite fascinated by this idea. It doesn't bother me to have it used as the means of time travel. It's not really plausible as such, but this is soft SF, where the premise doesn't have to be grounded in realistic science; it's just understood to be a literary conceit used to get the protagonist (Hank) to the setting where the author can spin the story he wants to tell. The problem here, from my viewpoint, is that once Hank's there, that story just doesn't work well for me.

Superficially, this novel has significant commonalities with T. H. White's The Once and Future King: both have a speculative fiction element, both are approached in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, both are really interested in making philosophical and social points, and both adopt the convention of the Arthurian era as resembling the High Middle Ages (when the Arthurian literature that shaped the later views of the legend was written), with armored knights operating with a code of chivalry, etc. rather than realistically depicting its actual Dark Ages setting. They both also anachronistically mix many elements of the writers' contemporary material and social culture with the past setting; and even both have wildly clashing tone at times, with humor in some places, depictions or references to grim/grisly violence in others, and serious, moving passages in still others --though White blends those elements into a mixture more smoothly than Twain does. But I gave White's work five stars, and Twain's only one. As this suggests, the differences are more significant than the similarities.

White essentially sees medieval and modern people as sharing a common human nature, good and bad, and is basically sympathetic to medieval culture; it's not viewed as inherently inferior to that of the 1930s, when he was doing his writing, and in fact the two have a lot in common. That shows in his tone and treatment. Twain, on the other hand, approaches the Middle Ages with a markedly condescending attitude of what's sometimes called "presentism," blended with the assumption, which I often encountered as a kid and young man in talking to people who were largely ignorant about history, that past eras were more technologically primitive than their own, not because less of a knowledge base had been built up, but because the people who lived then were mostly just moronically stupid compared to moderns. (Obviously, they weren't --and I observed that the moderns who held that view usually weren't themselves poster boys/girls for brilliance. :-( ) This shows in tone and treatment as well. It's related to the theme of Hank's wholesale introduction of late 19th-century technology into the past setting; this is portrayed as an unambiguously good thing with, as I recall, no particular downside or consideration of technology's social costs and problems.

To be sure, Twain does see a common human nature, to a degree, among all people regardless of how much technology they have; but where White's view of mankind is more nuanced, recognizing both its good and bad potentialities, Twain's view of humanity in the mass is starkly pessimistic --even with the glorious benefits of 19th-century technology, humans can be expected to screw things up dramatically. (That holds a message for his 19th-century readers more than for the 6th century; he doesn't spell it out explicitly, but it's there.) That makes this a much more existentially pessimistic novel than White's Arthurian corpus; and where existential pessimism in a writer like Lovecraft is more a tacked-on "moral of the story," here it's in the warp and woof of the plot. (It could be said that Twain views human nature much like Christianity pictures the depravity wrought by our fallen state; but not being himself a Christian, he doesn't temper it with any conception of possible redeeming grace.) Add to this, cardboard characterizations --Hank and all the other major characters are pretty two-dimensional, and Merlin here is essentially a cartoon villain-- a romance that I didn't personally feel as any real emotional connection, and story-telling that I didn't really find plausible within its own frame of reference, nor very compelling as a story, and you have all the ingredients for an epic fail as a read. (As the saying goes, "Your mileage may vary!") ...more

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