How wonderfully we are deliver’d, when we know nothing of it.
Continuing in the vein of solitude from the last two reviews, Daniel Dafoe’s 1719 classic, widely considered the first English novel, has been adapted for film 132 times, starring the likes of Douglas Fairbanks and Pierce Brosnan. Who can resist a castaway story that doesn’t end in death or madness, let alone one in which the hero, even after twenty-three years, could have been content to have capitulated for spending the rest of [his] life there?
If travelers stranded in the wild make for good viewing, Crusoe’s life is less Bear Grylls than Old MacDonald, for he was fortunate enough to land on fertile ground with no predators: just easily domesticated goats and parrots. On top of that there was a bounty of shipwrecked booty: seeds for planting as well as bread to tide him over, tools, guns, pets, and even rum! All he wanted was company, so he saved the intended victim of visiting cannibals and got his servant Friday in the bargain. The story, unlikely as it seems, is actually the embellished tale of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk, who was marooned for four years not in the Caribbean, as Dafoe depicts, but on an Argentine island featured in this BBC special .
It had been thirty years since I last read this tale, and I was delighted to rediscover Crusoe’s industrious ingenuity. Deprived of the story’s surprises though, the cumbersome language felt more stilted than I remembered. Furthermore, I had forgotten the evangelical point of the entire plot: that God provides. For a taste of such theological musings, check out this debate between Crusoe (Brosnan) and Friday (William Takaku) . That which is powerful in the film, alas, seems too Joel Osteen on the page. I wanted a survival manual, not a testimony of Christian witness. But those were the times—speaking of which, Crusoe’s entitled colonial attitude is grating to modern sensibilities. More baffling was his abandonment of other European castaways with whom he ultimately planned to return to civilization. Another ship came along and, oh well, he left without them. I’m still grappling with that unchristian move. Still, Dafoe didn’t do badly for a first novel, especially a first by anyone!
If, after all this gravity, you’re in the mood for a little frivolity, play Al Jolson’s hit song Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?