Customer Reviews

The Wrecker

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The Wrecker by R.L. Stevenson was a pleasant surprise. I saw the book described somewhere and thought "give it a go". I, like most people of my age cohort, have read Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, you know, the usual canon. I wanted to read something classic, yet relatively unknown and The Wrecker fit the bill. I was not disappointed in the least! Great descriptive phrasing, wonderful language use, fun 19th Century argot, and a complex, twisty plot; who wouldn't be happy. Yes, of course, you have to be an experienced, diverse reader and willing to puzzle out some of the references, but this made the experience all that more enjoyable for me. This is not an exercise for the intellectually lazy. What a joy, though, to read and engaging, 'old style' novel. Stevenson got the sailing and natural elements just right. I certainly cannot remember the last novel that I enjoyed more and the craftsmanship of language and style were a wonderful reward. I can't recommend The Wrecker enough if you desire an escape from the mundane world of the current written "product".
There were some minor typographical problems in my copy, which was regrettable, but not a deal breaker.
If you need a bit of a challenge and want to enjoy the craft of writing in the old style, you would benefit from spending your time with Stevenson's The Wrecker.

In the epilogue of the lost classic, The Wrecker, besides explaining what became of his characters, Robert Louis Stevenson (along with Osbourne, his stepson) deigns to explain his work, or rather his fictitious author's work, as something of a new form: the literary crime novel. By this he means the story starts out as a sort of novel of manners, chronicling the early life and experiences in the "money hunt" of the main characters, then finishes with a flourish of enthralling crime on the high seas. In approaching the novel in this style, the author hopes to lessen the "insincerity and shallowness of tone" of the common "police" novel and make the "mystery seem to inhere in life". But later, regarding this technique, he confesses: "it occurred to us it had been invented previously by someone else, and was in fact - however painfully different the results may seem - the method of Charles Dickens in his later works."


The results in question indeed deliver a painfully good story. This is the tale of an aspiring young sculptor, Loudon Dodd. He is the son of a land surveyor turned real estate speculator; an unhappy man as Dodd puts it, unhappy in life, in business, and sorry to say, unhappy with his son. Dodd goes on to relate his experiences in college, both home in Muskegon and abroad in Paris; his close, bittersweet relationship with his father; his attempt to become an artisan, sculpting and scraping by; and of the bond that develops between him and his schoolmate in Paris, Pinkerton. Later, back in the states, he and Pinkerton, become business partners. In a scheme for some quick money, they wind up buying a shipwreck rumored to have cloaked value. Lloyds of London routinely held auctions for such wrecks (Brigs, Schooners, etc...) that had been ravaged by the weather, on the reefs or by other unfortunate means. Stevenson's auction is a fine piece of writing, and it is at this point in the book that the story gets lift. Dodd subsequently rounds up a ship and a crew and sets sail for Midway Island, the site of their newly purchased wrecker. Sea dogs, the south Pacific, and hidden treasure all conspire to enlist the reader in the remainder of Stevenson's wonderful adventure. Though it doesn't come without a cost. Lust for wealth, which becomes nearly ubiquitous, is clearly the demon seed of this cautionary tale.


Interestingly, The Wrecker was a favorite of the Argentine poet and essayist Jose Luis Borges, who couldn't have written more differently than Stevenson, but who nonetheless returned to the text more often than any other. Borges' obsession with The Wrecker is examined in a recent NY Times article. by Rivka Galchen. But I have my own theory why Borges enjoyed this work so much: the hidden treasure within.


~Book Jones~ 4.5 Stars

The Nabu Public Domain Reprint is a photo-reproduction of what looks like a 1905 edition, which would be fine except that on most pages the last line (sometimes the last two lines) are either so distorted as to be illegible, or cut off entirely. This makes for very frustrating reading. It would be far preferable to get your hands on an old copy. This is a case in which buying online proves a mistake (a brief physical examination would have revealed the defect).

The novel is uneven; I found the first part slow and somewhat artificial, by which I mean, lacking in illusion of reality. But about a third of the way in the old Stevenson magic kicks in, and the middle part is top notch. The ending, though perhaps not quite as strong, still works pretty well. All in all, an interesting blend of a dark sort of romanticism with a very gritty realism. A sort of nineteenth-century noir.