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.