Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)

Ten years after Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain went ahead and wrote another novel with Tom Sawyer and Jim the slave, narrated by Huck. I didn’t even know this existed until recently. It’s very short, under 200 pages, and another parody of European romantic literature. This time the target is specifically Jules Verne, who was only seven years older than Twain and alive at the time. Full disclosure, I have never read Verne, not even when I was a kid and slogging through Robert Louis Stevenson adventure books for kids, so I can’t speak to how well Tom Sawyer Abroad works that way. It looks more to me like Twain put his favorite characters in a balloon and that was supposed to be enough. They step into the thing in a carnival passing through Missouri, it breaks loose, and here we are. It is reminiscent to me in many ways of the Wizard of Oz story too, but that came later. Twain’s balloon is a finely tuned machine, much like a steamboat. It ranges up high for cooler temperatures and can practically scud along at ground level. But it takes even Tom Sawyer some time to figure out all the controls. There’s also a mad scientist on the scene, and food and water to last for months. That’s handy, because they’re crossing the Atlantic before Tom figures out how to control the balloon. They end up over the Sahara Desert for retellings of stories from Arabian Nights along with raft loads of American innocence. It’s supposed to be funny but it’s not really, and the treatment of Jim is at least as bad as in Huck Finn. I enjoyed Tom Sawyer Abroad more than I expected but I didn’t expect much. It’s certainly for completists only. I like Huck’s voice, which is more or less Twain but with more dialect. Are we seeing Twain run out of ideas as he approaches the age of 60? Or was this the only thing he could get publishers and/or the reading public to go for? It’s his second book with “Tom Sawyer” in the title, his third book with “Abroad,” and the umpteenth parodying European literature. At least there is no plot point about babies being switched at birth. Tom Sawyer Abroad does have the virtue of being short and quick and who knows? Maybe some will like the chance to hang out more with Tom, Huck, and Jim. I’ll admit it was probably what I liked most about it. But then there’s the problem of Jim’s continuing mistreatment, which is unfortunate enough to torpedo the whole fragile vessel. File under I read it so you don’t have to.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.