Customer Reviews

Roderick Random (Penguin Classics)

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I picked up this book in relation to research I was doing for a class and although I don't usually care for fiction I was completely sucked in and devoured it whole in no time. It's a literary delicatessen full of slices of life from the period.

What makes this book so interesting is Roderick's naivety as a young Scottish man in his early 20s trying to make his way with little or no help in a hostile and socially brutal London, which makes it easy to identify with him these centuries later. And Random as a character can be just as hostile and brutal himself, as he admits. The book is full of real people and adult situations, including Random's own period of recuperation from an unnamed venereal disease, sharing a garrett with a woman with the same problem.

Another fascinating and appalling aspect is Random's involvement in transporting captured slaves for sale in Jamaica, whom he and everyone else regards with no more respect than a cargo of chickens or goats.

I have very little respect for "historical novels" written today that pretend to recreate the past. This book, on the other hand, is the real thing.

In a letter to Alexander Carlyle just before RODERICK RANDOM was to be published, Smollett wrote that the novel "is intended as a Satire of Mankind." Stringing together a seemingly endless stream of incidents as they befall his main character as he makes his way in the world, the book depicts life as sometimes innocent but often cruel. Through the use of farce, mistaken identity, clownish behavior, and tomfoolery Smollett employs all the tricks of the picaresque trade to relate his story. Random is left penniless in Scotland by his father, and he and a chum Strap leave for London. Along the way all kinds of adventures, good and bad, await them. Later Random makes his way to South America aboard a British warship (the earliest novel with a shipboard setting, and one that is autobiographical) where by coincidence he meets his now rich father (disguised as the trader Don Roderigo), who sets up Random with an inheritance and a means to marry. Though scenes in the book can be cruel, the humor throughout is broad and sharp. Whether getting cheated in cards by a con artist or sliding into bed with a beautiful maiden under a false identity, Random seems to experience just about all the vagaries life has to offer.