As I rambled recently, Hesperus Press have been kind enough recently to provide me with a review copy of The Coral Island, a book I haven’t read since childhood and thought I could remember nothing at all about. It’s part of their new Hesperus Minor range and comes with a lovely cover design (with French Flaps, of course) and useful foreword. It was somehow fatter than I’d anticipated but the type is of reasonable size, which is useful for someone whose eyesight is not what it was!
When I was growing up, there wasn’t a lot of money spare for books and so those I had tended to be inherited from somewhere or picked up at jumble sales. I had several battered old hardback classics, like “Little Women” and “Heidi” and or course a bedraggled copy of “The Coral Island”; none of these books had dust jackets any more, just coming in plain cloth boards, and it was a surprise to realise as I grew up that books were meant to have nice paper covers too! So this edition is of course a bit of an improvement on that long-lost copy.
Wikipedia has this to say about Ballantyne:
R. M. Ballantyne (24 April 1825 – 8 February 1894) was a Scottish writer of juvenile fiction and wrote over 100 books.He was also an accomplished artist and exhibited some of his water-colours at the Royal Scottish Academy. He belonged to a famous family of printers and publishers.
and this about The Coral Island:
The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean (1858) is a novel written by Scottish author R. M. Ballantyne. One of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes, the story relates the adventures of three boys marooned on a South Pacific island, the only survivors of a shipwreck.
A typical Robinsonade – a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – and one of the most popular of its type, the book first went on sale in late 1857 and has never been out of print. Among the novel’s major themes are the civilising effect of Christianity, the spread of trade in the Pacific and the importance of hierarchy and leadership. It was the inspiration for William Golding’s dystopian Lord of the Flies (1954), which inverted the morality of The Coral Island: in Ballantyne’s story the children encounter evil, but in The Lord of the Flies evil is within them.
Although considered by modern critics to feature a dated imperialist view of the world, The Coral Island was voted one of the top twenty Scottish novels at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference in 2006.
Three young lads, Jack (19), Ralph (15) and Peterkin (13), meet on board ship where they are all setting off to sail the seven seas. But a shipwreck leaves them stranded on a coral island and they must use all their resourcefulness to survive. Fortunately, the island is the ideal place to have landed – there is food, water and shelter; the climate is mainly balmy; and initially there is no sign of hostile life. So the first half of the book consists of plenty of adventuring round the island – building a shelter, learning to make fire, hunting and fishing and preparing food; making clothing out of tree-cloth and the like. There are signs of previous civilization on the island, in the form of an old hut with a skeleton, but apart from that all seems well. That is, until we get halfway through the book, and the outside world makes an appearance in the form of warring groups of hostile cannibals. Fortunately, the boys win through on this occasion, but then events take a more sinister turn as a bunch of pirates turn up and seize Ralph – will he ever return to Coral Island and his friends?
One of the things that astonished me at first on this read was quite how bloodthirsty the book is! There’s plenty of skull-crashing, torture, violence and cannibalism, most of which would probably not see the light of day from the pen of a modern author. But this violence *is* necessary because there is an underlying moral theme to the book, embodied by Ralph’s Christian faith and the appearance of missionaries throughout the story, bringing enlightenment to the heathen. It’s all to easy to criticise the book for its stereotyping of the natives, but this is how they were perceived at the time and allowance must be made for the time it was written.
“The morning was exceedingly lovely. It was one of that very still and peaceful sort which made the few noises that we heard seem to be quiet noises. I know no other way of expressing this idea. Noises which so far from interrupting the universal tranquillity of earth, sea, and sky – rather tended to reveal to us how quiet the world around us really was. Such sounds as I refer to were, the peculiar melancholy – yet, it seemed to me, cheerful – plaint of seabirds floating on the glassy water, or sailing in the sky, also the subdued twittering of little birds among the bushes, the faint ripples on the beach, and the solemn boom of the surf upon the distant coral reef. We felt very glad in our hears as we walked along the sands side by side.”
However, the adventure story itself is a cracking good yarn (to coin a phrase!). The boys are a lovely group of characters, all different – Jack, the sensible leader; Ralph the dreamy philosopher; and Peterkin the young joker. Boys this young really *did* go to sea in the 1800s which is a scary thought, but they certainly have to go on a steep learning curve! The influence of Defoe is of course clear, and I did wonder whether the body of the previous resident the boys found was meant to be a reference to Crusoe! The action is the second half of the book is very exciting and the writing is lovely in places – Ballantyne is great at conjuring up the beauty and the atmosphere of the island and the call of the ocean. It’s not hard to see why this book was so popular on its publication and continues to be so – good storytelling never goes out of fashion!
“That night the starry sky looked down through the gently rustling trees upon our slumbers, and the distant roaring of the surf upon the coral reef was our lullaby.”
I also found myself remembering little bits of plot and action as I read, which was lovely as it proved to me that I still have memories of my childhood reading! Revisiting “The Coral Island” was great fund and maybe I shall have to take a few more trips down memory lane with childhood favourites!
Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings 