Robinson Crusoe's return

by Barry Pain

Everybody who enjoys a hearty laugh should read this genuinely funny book. With that whimsical, dry humour, of which he is master, Mr. Barry Pain describes the return of Robinson Crusoe to modern England, and his experiences in our midst.

From the first to the last the skit is exceedingly amusing. There is a laugh on every page.

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1906

About the author

Born in Cambridge, Barry Eric Odell Pain was educated at Sedbergh School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He became a prominent contributor to The Granta. He was known as a writer of parody and lightly humorous stories.

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a humorous novella relating the misadventures of Robinson Crusoe in modern London, where he has floundered after drinking the potion of Eternal Middle-Age and setting out in his raft. By "modern," I mean 1906. As an American a century later, I found a lot of the humor went over my head. I had to Google what a "test match" is and still can't figure out what Pain meant by "Bengkoldy."

What I did appreciate was the spot-on Defoe satire. Besides his repetitive religious blather, there is also the fact that Crusoe seems to get along better in frontier and foreign settings than in "civilized" Christian lands (despite his fervent belief in European superiority) and constantly assumes the worst of people of color, to an extent that is laughably grotesque. (He thinks the black street musicians will eat the white children if their parents don't pay them.) Maybe someone could write a third installment with Crusoe and George Rats in the twenty-first century.