Castaway Tales: From Robinson Crusoe to Life of Pi

by Christopher Palmer

Ever since Robinson Crusoe washed ashore, the castaway story has survived and prospered, inspiring a multitude of writers of adventure fiction to imitate and adapt its mythic elements. In his brilliant critical study of this popular genre, Christopher Palmer traces the castaway tales’ history and changes through periods of settlement, violence, and reconciliation, and across genres and languages. Showing how subsequent authors have parodied or inverted the castaway tale, Palmer concentrates on the period following H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau. These much darker visions are seen in later novels including William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island, and Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory. In these and other variations, the castaway becomes a cannibal, the castaway’s island is relocated to center of London, female castaways mock the traditional masculinity of the original Crusoe, or Friday ceases to be a biddable servant. By the mid-twentieth century, the castaway tale has plunged into violence and madness, only to see it return in young adult novels—such as Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins and Terry Pratchett’s Nation—to the buoyancy and optimism of the original. The result is a fascinating series of revisions of violence and pessimism, but also reconciliation.

Hardcover is un-jacketed.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published May 10, 2016

Reviews

[Sohail · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spoiler alert! The first thing that you have to know about this book before reading it is that it is full of spoilers (sorry if I spoiled the book for you).

Aside from that, it's an easy to read book about changing trends in the evolution of castaway fiction, i.e. novels and short stories about castaways and isolated people in remote locations (Robinson Crusoesque). It is not a comprehensive book, though. Instead of discussing a great number of titles, it pursues a holistic approach by analyzing a limited number of important milestones, and discussing the trends that they introduced, or followed.

It's informative book, albeit its relative lack of focus that is due to jumping from topic to topic without any rational justification.