Just Couldn’t Finish Reading: Erewhon by Samuel Butler (FP: 1872)

Like many Utopian tales this starts with the end – or with the hero of the piece recounting his story of finding a lost civilisation in an out of the way place and trying to drum up support to get back there based on nothing more than his word and his ability to make the reader believe he actually did visit the places he claimed to have done.

So far so good. The first few chapters (once you got used to the style and outdated phasing) where interesting enough as the author explained his situation in a fresh colony somewhere – unnamed to as to prevent others beating him back to Erewhon (an anagram of Nowhere). There followed his journey across an increasingly uncharted interior and his eventual stumbling upon what he though was a lost tribe of Israel (I kid you not). Actually the quasi-religious aspects of the book completely baffled me which really didn’t help with its readability.

Then we reached the boring bit as the author related in detail the strange structures of Erewhonian society. The differences from mid-Victorian England must have (I expect) reduced English readers to hysterical chuckling. I guess you really had to be a Victorian to appreciate that aspect of it. Some ideas, once you got over their implied racism and class snobbery, did interest me. The idea of the spirits of unborn children fixating on human couples and basically badgering them to be born was something I’d never come across before and it did make me smile that only the particularly stupid and persistent spirits managed to be born into human form! But the most interesting aspect, running over two chapters was the Erewhonian fear of technology (which managed to get the author into trouble because he carried a pocket watch!) caused by one of their philosophers centuries before predicting the machines would at some point become smart enough to enslave or kill the civilisation that built them.

Unfortunately you really had the wade through page after page of turgid prose to dig up any nuggets of literary gold (actually bronze, maybe silver) and finally after 160 pages I gave up. It’s not something I do very often but I couldn’t really face another few days struggling towards the end of this book. I understand that this is a recognised classic but it just didn’t do it for me. It’s probably because it’s a Utopian novel and I’ve always enjoyed the Dystopia's so much more. Hopefully I’ll have much better luck with forthcoming classics. Understandably not recommended.