BOOK REPORT: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

Title:  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Author:    Mark Twain

Original Copyright Date:        1889

My Rating:   2 out of 5 stars  ( might be a good short story )

Backcover Description

One of the greatest satires in American literature, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court begins when Hank Morgan, a skilled mechanic in a nineteenth-century New England arms factory, is struck on the head during a quarrel and awakens to find himself among the knights and magicians of King Arthur’s Camelot.

What follows is a culture clash of the first magnitude, as practical-minded Hank, disgusted with the ignorance and superstition of the people, decides to enlighten them with education and technology. Through a series of wonderfully imaginative adventures, Twain celebrates American homespun ingenuity and democracy as compared to the backward ineptitude of a chivalric monarchy. At the same time, however, Twain raises the question of whether material progress necessarily creates a better society. As Hank becomes more powerful and self-righteous, he also becomes more ruthless, more autocratic, and less able to control events, until the only way out is a massively destructive war.

My Thoughts
Mark Twain wrote Connecticut Yankee as a satire on royalty, chivalry and other romantic notions of Arthurian legend (linking it occasionally  to the politics of the antebellum south transitioning to the postbellum reconstruction) However, I have to say he didn't execute it very well. It might have made an entertaining short story, but this went on and on, changing voices, direction, and sometimes bringing the story to a dead stop.

The premise behind this book is a common one now-a-days, but from what I understand, Twain was one of the first, if not the first to have a person bump their head or fall asleep only to wake up in another time. In this case, an intelligent, renaissance man who works in a arms factory wakes up in 6th century England in King Arthur's court.  Think of the Yankee as a nineteen-century MacGyver.

The problem is, the Yankee is too powerful.  He knows everything, from the exact moment in time a solar eclipse will occur over England 1300 years before he is born in Connecticut, to mining and metallurgy, chemistry, biology, politics, art, underwater basket weaving, and other magical skills which shock and awe the native royal ignoramuses.  He is not a likable character at all.  

Twain spends an inordinate amount of narrative having the unlikable yankee waxing philosophical on the mundane aspects of life beyond King Arthur's court, including economics, the politics of "freemen" vs. slaves vs. nobility and the churches motivation for keeping the royal status quo.  Twain will then gloss over years of time where he gains power and creates a network of educated lackeys which work diligently in the background setting up phone lines and creating an intelligentsia which will aid and support his goal of usurping this backward monarchy and setting up a proper republic. I would have found those details much more interesting.

Now, for all of its warts, Connecticut Yankee does have its moments.  There is a fabulous chapter where the Yankee is sent off on a noble quest to free 9 princesses from some evil ogres in which he describes life inside a suit of armor.  Then there is the way he uses the knights as riding advertisements for products for which there isn't a market yet (like soap).  But, these moments are sparse and I had trouble fighting through the doldrums to get to the next enjoyable scene.

On a final note, this story was MUCH darker than I was expecting.  In his quest to oust the nobility  and set up a republic, The yankee is absolutely merciless in its execution.  I've read a few  pieces on Mark Twain since finishing this book, hoping to find some reasoning for the way Twain wrote this novel, only to really find out that Connecticut Yankee is a transition in Twain's literary career, where he enters a very dark phase.  To borrow a section from the Wikipedia page on this Connecticut Yankee:

 It is possible to see the book as an important transitional work for Twain, in that earlier, sunnier passages recall the frontier humor of his tall tales like The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, while the corrosive view of human behavior in the apocalyptic latter chapters is more akin to darker, later Twain works like The Mysterious Stranger and Letters from the Earth.

BOOK REPORT: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Title:                    Huckleberry Finn

Author:                Mark Twain (Samual Clemens)

Original Copyright Date:         1885

Would Recommend to a friend?: Yes

Back Cover Description: 

Floating down the Mississippi on their raft, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, find life filled with excitement and the spirit of adventure. Join Huck and Jim and their old friend Tom Sawyer as they come up against low-down thieves and murderers, whilst being chased by Huck's evil, drunken father who is after Huck's treasure. It is a trip that you will never tire of.

My Thoughts:

I was amazed at the complexity of Huckleberry Finn; it went well beyond my expectations. I was expecting an adventure story following a boy riding down the Mississippi River, getting into all sorts of scrapes and near-misses caused by Huck's "boys will be boys" attitude;  I was expecting Treasure Island or King Soloman's Mines. What I got was literature in every sense of the word.  Slavery, Race, Religion, are just some of the themes that even a non-english major can pick out.

I was shell-shocked by the bluntness of language used by Mark Twain when I read some of the passages. For example, the following occurs when Jim (the runaway slave) and Huck have been on the river for a few days is as simple of an explanation of how Huck saw slavery that is, to me, completely unfathomable today:

"Jim Talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them.

    It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, 'give a nigger an inch and he'll take and ell.' Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children -- children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm."

The passage also demonstrates one of the themes that struck me the most. that despite being an orphan most of his life, an outsider who doesn't want to fit into Miss Watson's normal life with schoolin' and churchin', with a drunk abusive father showing up to take advantage of  Huck's fortune outlined in Tom Sayer, he still thinks about slavery as just the way things were, and asks himself why he is helping Jim. Huck wrestles with what is deemed to be normal and right throughout the book. It doesn't take Huck long to realize that the right thing to do is to help Jim, even though his reasoning isn't quite as strong as, "Slavery is bad and I should do what I can to stop it."

"... and I see it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get started right when he's little, ain't got no show -- when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on, --s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up; would you feel better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad --I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't  no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?"

and further, as Huck and Jim travel on down the river a ways, we see his internal conflict grow from a selfish motivation to keep moving down the river with Jim to a religious one as things get a bit more difficult.
The following quote has Huck praying to "quit being the kind of boy he was, and be better".  Better in terms of what was again, deemed to be normal and right...

"So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie-- and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie-- I found that out."

He thinks that by not turning in Jim, people would consider it a sin; that to not live "right", he was committing a sin. But the bigger sin to Huck is not being honest and true to himself.

A few years from now, I would like to read Huckleberry Finn again to try and get more from it.  I have no doubt that this book will offer me something more.