James by Percival Everett is a 2024 retelling of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both books set in the Mississippi Valley of the 1830s. Young Huck fakes his own death to escape his violent, drunken father, meets up with a runaway slave called Jim and sails down the Mississippi with him on an improvised raft in search of freedom. This time we hear the story from Jim’s point of view.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was very much about a natural, free, frontier existence colliding with a more settled manner of living. Huck is part feral child, part school boy. James in many ways covers the same ambivalent territory. Now seeing things from Jim’s perspective, we learn that Jim, is a secret intellectual. He has been in the habit of sneaking into libraries and reading. He disguises the unacceptable truth of his education by speaking in slave vernacular and pretending to be highly superstitious.

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, literature is an enigmatic idea, sometimes representing the development of humanity, sometimes a symbol of its backsliding from original innocence. In James, literature is more the representation of social struggle. Just as money and power are reserved by one dominant group, so too is learning and reading. In some ways books are just the trappings of success, like fine clothes and big houses. The way to fight back is to grab a pencil and start making your own account, which is what Jim does at huge personal risk. However, as James continues, there is a feeling that literature is not merely a means of waging cultural warfare. There is a potential for writing to be something that unites rather than divides. There are so many occasions in the book when the bitter dividing lines of black and white merge into one another. At one point Jim joins a touring minstrel singing group of white men in black makeup, Jim strikes up a friendship with Norman, who has one white and one black parent. But Norman looks white, acts white but sees himself as black. So, while James is about cultural struggle, it’s also an exploration of grey areas, where divisions are illusory.

Rewrites of famous novels tend to make me nervous. It takes some confidence to put yourself up against a classic author and expect to look good. But James is an excellent read, very funny in parts, unflinching and thought provoking. I have to admit, in straight-forward reading pleasure terms, to enjoying this book more than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I read directly after James. Bravo.

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in 1884, tells the story of a young Missouri boy growing up in the 1830s. With no mother and a drunken, abusive father, Huck is on the cusp of feral child and school boy. Maybe he is a bit like his country, which is moving out of its frontier phase into a more settled existence. This ambivalent position underlies the conundrums of the book. Huck’s guardian, Widow Douglas tries to ‘sivilise’ Huck by sending him to school, which can feel restrictive and false compared to Huck’s freewheeling former life spent out in the woods. On the other hand Huck’s father Pap, a drunk, coarse, and violent man, hardly suggests the virtues of a simple life close to the land. Then there’s the presentation of books and learning. Books might be the guiding light of Huck’s friend Tom Sawyer, but they appear to be as misleading as they are illuminating. For Tom, if it’s in a book it must be true, an idea that leads to all kinds of nonsense as the boy tries to apply the stuff he has read in books to real life. Finally, there’s conceptions of justice, which might be the complex business of law embodied in the upstanding character of Judge Thatcher; or the ‘natural law’ of an individual’s conscience. Here things get murky as we see Huck’s ‘conscience’ manipulated by a kind of social indoctrination. The young boy has always seen slaves as possessions. Huck does end up helping a slave find his freedom, but he feels his actions in doing this are the result of personal weakness rather than the dictates of his conscience.

The book is written in an apparently plain, homespun, but carefully constructed vernacular style – Huck’s narration falling somewhere between wild and civilised. The story is, in many ways farcical, the bigger picture saved from silliness by the sense that the plot’s crazy twists and turns, often cooked up by Tom Sawyer from his reading, represent the uncomfortable meeting of books and reality. I sometimes found the knockabout business rather hard work to get through, but there were always interesting ideas bubbling around beneath the surface.

Overall The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a deserved classic, and an interesting road marker on the road of America’s development as a country.

Western Lane is a 2023 novel by Chetna Maroo, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s in the tradition of stories where children with issues are straightened out by the discipline and purpose found in sport. Described like this the book might sound formulaic, which it’s not. The children involved here are three generally well behaved, quiet girls, struggling with the death of their mother. They have been brought up in the UK, but are very much part of the tightly knit London Asian community in which they live. The three girls are only ‘wild’ when viewed through the perspective of their highly traditional aunt, who thinks wearing shorts and running qualify a girl as ‘wild’.

The story focuses on the youngest girl, Gopi, who responds best to her father’s coping mechanism of playing squash. Attending a local sports club called Western Lane, she enjoys the discipline and focus of squash, becoming fascinated by the sports personalities. Playing with a promising boy, with whom she develops a close connection, Gopi makes rapid progress, so much so that she is entered into a tournament. But hanging in the background of this positive story is the threat that with her mother gone, Gopi might be sent away to live with her Aunt Ranjan, the same aunt who thinks the wearing of shorts is a definition of wild behaviour.

Sport in a story is generally a metaphor for trial and eventual redemption. This is true here, with squash uniquely fitting to the situation of Gopi. Players are tightly confined in an enclosed court. Gopi lives in a tightly knit community, with Aunt Ranjan representing its most conservative aspects. Squash is about discipline, and in a normal sports story this is what a troubled youngster would probably need most. In Western Lane there is, ironically, a compelling sense that rather than self control, Gopi essentially finds freedom through the game. It’s this tension between freedom and restriction that really drives the story. The contradiction is explored in such a way that you might even end up feeling that the universe is a big squash court with the stars as smudges on the walls.

With some books there’s a worry in reviewing them that you might give away what happens at the end. Will Gopi be allowed to play squash long term? Will she get together with her training partner boyfriend? I can’t give away the end in this case, because even in reading the book I don’t know what happens, so enigmatic are the final pages. But by then, you do feel that whatever restrictions life brings along, there is the possibility of making them into a squash court, and whacking balls off the walls in fascinating ways.

Western Lane is an excellent sports book, using a familiar idea to explore unfamiliar territory, both social and philosophical. It’s also a rarity these days in being a story with children as central characters, which doesn’t see itself as only playing to an audience of children. The walls around the classification of this novel are interestingly transparent. Bravo.

Mr Norris Changes Trains (published in America as The Last of Mr Norris) is a 1935 novel by Christopher Isherwood, set in Berlin during the Nazis’ rise to power. An unassuming English tutor, William Bradshaw, describes a friendship with Arthur Norris, a furtive man of refined tastes and straightened circumstances who he meets on a train.

Bradshaw is a quiet observer of Berlin life. He notes how the political powers-that-be are increasingly classifying people as in or out, worthy or unworthy. By contrast, Mr Norris Changes Trains is a work of observation rather than judgement, seeing people as an intricate mixture of attributes. The book is too enigmatic to have a moral as such, set in a world where, ironically, a black and white conception of good and bad has led to moral collapse. You could, however, in a roundabout way, say that Mr Norris Changes Trains is an argument for accepting that life is complicated. It doesn’t shout its message’, and if the bag search in the opening train scene had found Mr Norris Changes Trains, it would scarcely have merited a glance. Only in this manner could the book cross the border and in its own sly way, inform us of how things are. The book takes a different approach to the much more in-your-face articles of the journalist character, Helen Pratt, who gets the publication she is working for closed down, before she swans off to continue her hard-hitting journalism in America.

I have read that Christopher Isherwood ended up losing faith in Mr Norris Changes Trains, which is a shame. I thought it a great book – engaging and fun, as though P.G. Wodehouse decided to indulge his darker side. Norris makes me think of a Bertie Wooster figure, presented here in later life as a kind of con artist making a feckless living using his smart contacts, while Jeeves metamorphoses into Schmidt, a self-serving thug who intimidates his master. And yet the book is also serious and relevant, both to the times in which it was written, and to any situation where people believe in simple solutions to complex problems