Monthly Archives: February 2025

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

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Summary: Huck and Jim try to flee their woes, stalked by the malevolent figure of Tom Sawyer.

Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist made famous by the movie, The Killing Fields, wrote that the most terrifying of the Khmer Rouge were the child soldiers. They had no sense of either mortality or conscience and would kill with no compunction and little excuse.

In his writings on Vietnam, Tim O’Brien also describes this phenomenon amongst American troops, themselves little more than children. O’Brien describes the results when they are unleashed, as the dogs of war inevitably are, on a substantially defenceless civilian population whose pleas for mercy the Americans never understand.

The literary archetype for this monstrousness is perhaps Tom Sawyer. While not the main focus of this book, his presence when he appears inevitably causes mayhem, anguish and a threat to life for any with the misfortune to cross this dangerous clown’s path.

Huckleberry Finn is one of the great novels of America. In it Huck, a free-spirited kid who has grown up in the woods, and Jim, an escaped slave, both flee to the Mississippi River to seek the freedom to pursue their different ideals of happiness.

Along the way they have comic and comic-dreadful encounters with con men, blood feuds, and slave catchers who threaten to undermine their plans. But perhaps the most sinister threat comes from Tom Sawyer, Huck’s supposed friend.

In the book Tom seems to embody not the ideal of personal freedom cherished by Huck and Jim, but another American ideal still very much at large: that of the virtue of overweening self interest. Nothing matters to Tom but his own amusement and he has no concern if the modest hopes of people he regards as lesser, particularly Jim, are torn apart in the service of his gratification.

The spirit of Tom Sawyer still pervades American politics. There is a lineal link from Tom’s ludicrous plans of piracy to Trump’s grotesque fantasies of the benefits of genocide in Gaza. Those Americans who gave repeated standing ovations to Benjamin Netanyahu when that war criminal and genocidist addressed a joint session of Congress embody the spirit of Tom Sawyer. For them too, the lives of large swathes of humanity simply do not matter.

Huckleberry Finn is a charming and very funny reflection on the American Dream. But it knows there is an American nightmare too, and it stares deep into that void left by the absence of American conscience.

The Ghosts of Rome, by Joseph O’Connor

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Summary: more Paddington 2 than Jaws 2

Sequels are a tricky thing. Some, like Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments add something to an earlier classic. More ill-judged ones, like Pat Barker’s The Women of Troy, can dent the lustre of their more accomplished predecessor, seeming to aim to cash in on a successful formula rather than say anything compelling or new.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up the Ghosts of Rome, Joseph O’Connor’s follow up to his superb novel of European Resistance to Nazism, My Father’s House.

Time has moved on a few months from the first novel, the German occupation has become more brutal, and the pressure on the Choir – the escape line for Allied prisoners of war and Jews established by Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty – more extreme.

The pattern that O’Connor uses for this book is similar to its prequel: It focuses on one operation, and one individual in the midst of the otherwise present and correct ensemble of the Choir, in this instance Contessa Giovanna Landini – Jo.

O’Connor admits that all of the novel, including the purported transcripts of BBC interviews, is his own invention. But many of the people involved including Jo and her Irish pals, Delia and her daughter Blon, were real. This accentuates the sense of awe regarding what these ordinary people endured and achieved in such extraordinary circumstances. And, even if we know they survived the war this does not diminish the tension.

The Ghosts of Rome is a gripping thriller. But like the best thrillers it is more than that. It explores and asserts the importance of morality and friendship in the face of monstrousness. These remain important ideals in a world in which the genocide of vulnerable people is again high on the agendas of many of the supposed liberal democracies of the West.