Review of a book read in another class (#2)

I'm taking a Children's Lit class (if you didn't already guess that from my last post on Where the Wild Things Are) and another of the books we've read was Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Treasure Island was published in 1883, at the peak of the Victorian era and is probably the most popular example of the boy's adventure story. Written for the author's son, Treasure Island was intended to include everything a young boy would find exciting: guns, fights, pirates, chases, mutiny, oh, and of course a treasure map. While modern little girls may also find these things entertaining, at the time this story was first published there were very distinct and diverging gender roles at work. Little boys were encouraged to be adventurous, brave, and violent when necessary. Little girls were expected to be pure, innocent, and gentle.

One of the reasons for this encouragement for young boys is because at that time England was all about building their empire and exploring the wide world and claiming as much of it as possible for the crown. As such, England needed brave and adventurous men, so as William Wordsworth put it earlier that century, "the child is father of the man", this genre of boys adventure story began appearing to foster these qualities in young boys.

One of the things I found very interesting about Treasure Island was the type-casting of the adult male role-models in the story and how Stevenson painted the main antagonist, Long John Silver, not as the stereotypical "bad guy" (dark greasy hair, long curly mustache, vulgar, violent, stupid, etc.), but rather as the most charismatic of the bunch. He's polite, he's intelligent, he's honorable, but at the same time he's supposed to be the bad guy.

I love that Stevenson did this. Otherwise, the story would be predictable and boring. Instead, you get this character that is completely unsuspected as a bad guy because he doesn't fit the mold of the bad guy. He's cripple (wooden leg), he's a respectable pub owner, he's well-spoken. And yet we find out by the end of the story that he'd throw his own mother under a bus to save his own hide when it came down to it. The character of Long John Silver strongly reminded me of the character Keyser Söze played by Kevin Spacey in the 1994 movie, The Usual Suspects.

The idea of using this kind of complexity in character development has definitely affected my own writing. Anyone can create the basic flat character stereotypes; i.e., the good guys wear white, the bad guys wear black. But truly entertaining characters are far more complex. Bad guys can be likable. Good guys can and should have issues and may not always be very likable. Appearances can be deceiving. It makes for more interesting reading and writing.