Tom Sawyer Abroad

The sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Tom Sawyer Abroad that tells the tale of Huck, Tom and Jim travelling in a hot air balloon to discover the wonders of Africa.

The story was not as interesting as that of the prequel. The circumstances are obviously different, in the previous novel Huck and Jim were travelling on a raft in constant danger, while this time they are almost isolated from any danger in their balloon with which they can observe and evade any adversaries on land. The whole story is unbelievable in the sense that I can imagine a trip downriver the Mississippi in a raft, but hardly a pleasure flight over the Atlantic at speeds in excess of 300 mph.

I found it quite annoying that Jim, the freed black slave, is portrayed as uneducated and superstitious, who is usually given all the work (like mending the clothes, shovelling tons of sand, being sent on a threethousand-mile errand to fetch a pipe, etc.) and left out of most of the fun. These two aspects (no danger and the way the only black character in the book is portrayed) made this book a one-time read for me.

Huckleberry Finn

I finally read what I should have read ages ago, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Its an exciting adventure novel that for me showed what can one achieve with just cleverness and self-reliance, but the last chapters turned out to be a Kafkian absurd nightmare situation without escape.

Up until the point Huck and Tom reunite to rescue Jim from the Phelps' slavery is a backdrop that  was part of the time, even if its hard to imagine that people would keep other people as property. It gets harder to accept that Huck doesn't think for one moment that liberating Jim is not a crime. Huck treats Jim as a bit stupid; in the novel he and most other blacks are portrayed as superstitious and are looked down upon.

I cannot judge how much of this is true for the era, but I can decide that the last adventure of the book — where they make up an elaborate plan to help Jim escape — is just plain cruel. Tom Sawyer plays with Jim's life like it was nothing and has him suffer through the fantasies of his with horrible effect on the poor Jim. The worst of all is that Jim trusts them the whole time and goes trough the plan just because Tom is white so he must know better.

In conclusion I am happy that those times are over even if the positive aspects of the era — where one could find hospitable people in any home, if he was not shot first — are lost as well.