Reviews

Good Morning, Mr Crusoe by Jack Robinson

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arirang's review

4.0

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe, published in the year MDCCXIX,
which for 300 Years has instructed the Men
of an Island off the Coast of Mainland Europe
to Contemn all Foreigners and Women.
Printed for CB editions in MMXIX.

Jack Robinson is one of a number of pen names of Charles Boyle, who runs the wonderful small independent publisher CB Editions (publisher e.g. of Murmur, winner of the 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize and recognised by ).

For Jack Robinson's Overcoat, and his contribution to literature generally, our 2018 Republic of Consciousness Prize jury gave Charles Boyle a special ‘The William Gass award for metafiction and for being the best person in publishing, like ever’ - Charles's rather bemused, take here (http://sonofabook.blogspot.com/2018/03/surprise-prize-murmur-it.html).

That prize was prompted in part by the 2017 publication of a diptych of novels, [b:An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B.|35111445|An Overcoat Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B.|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497110718s/35111445.jpg|56424633] and [b:Robinson|35400500|Robinson|Jack Robinson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1497111130s/35400500.jpg|56769853]. The latter written in the advent of Brexit, prompted the author to consider that:

Distrustful of outsiders, Britain was going back to Crusoe, still the only mirror in which is chooses to recognise itself, even thought that mirror has not for a long time offered a true reflection.

That latter book - my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2025434003 - was a blend of several things but the main strand a survey of the the literary and film descendents of Robinson Crusoe, but a particular branch of the family line, largely consisting of outsiders and nomads (Robinson in Kafka's [b:Amerika: The Missing Person|3218459|Amerika The Missing Person|Franz Kafka|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1446731964s/3218459.jpg|935000] a prime example).

There was also a fictional element with the introduction of a present-day companion and interlocutor for the narrator, Robinson, with whom he bickers in the text in a way strongly reminiscent of Lars and W. in Lars Iyer's [b:Spurious|9578031|Spurious|Lars Iyer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320541417s/9578031.jpg|14464916] trilogy, the inspiration explicitly acknowledged.

Good Morning, Mr Crusoe can be described as a reworking, update and further development of the same basic material, published to mark the 300th anniversary of the publication of [b:Robinson Crusoe|2932|Robinson Crusoe|Daniel Defoe|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1403180114s/2932.jpg|604666]. The references to the literary descendants are still there (and with the addition of a particular disturbing real-life 2019 representative - Tommy Robinson) as is the ficticious interlocutor Robinson. But the latter plays a lesser role, as the focus shifts more to the original text itself and what it tells us about British society then and since, particularly that part of society educated in the traditional public school boarding system, like the author himself but more importantly by the Old Etonians that still dominate UK politics (the unholy trinity of Brexit - Cameron, Johnson and Rees Mogg).

The author's quibble isn't with Defoe so much as this novel (he has much more time for Moll Flanders) and indeed not so much with the novel as the way in which it has been interpreted ever since as representing a particular strand of Englishness prevalent (see Tommy Robinson and Boris Johnson) at both ends of the socio-demographic spectrum.

Writing in a Guardian series on ‘The 100 Best Novels Written in English’ in 2013, Robert McCrum noted that ‘By the end of the nineteenth century, no book in English literary history had enjoyed more editions, spin-offs and translations than Robinson Crusoe, with more than 700 alternative versions.’

The making of lists is a very Crusoe activity; just one fifth of the books on McCrum’s list are by women; a third are by American writers; from the literatures of countries which are not majority English-speaking but where English has been an official language since colonial times and novels are written in it, zero entries. McCrum maintains that Defoe’s ‘classic novel is English literature at its finest’.

For myself, reading Robinson Crusoe is a dull plod. This book will argue that the reasons for its inclusion on any list of ‘best’ novels have little to do with literary merit and more because it surfed a wave of approval in which some ugly flotsam was swept up, and still is.

This is a rather denser text than many of Robinson's works which he has previously described as He short books, generally made up of fragments, in which fiction and fact bounce off each other: this is much more of a structured essay with the 105 pages of the main text accompanied by 47 pages of Notes and Asides.

But strongly recommended as is all of the author's work (and his publisher's books).

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About Jack Robinson

In Boyle's rather self-depreciating words on his authorial alter ego:

Jack-of-all-trades? Hardly. He’s no poet. He’s not a non-fiction writer because he likes making things up, but nor is he a novelist: he has a short attention span, he lacks stamina, he can’t sustain a plot and he’s not that interested in how characters develop. He writes short books, generally made up of fragments, in which fiction and fact bounce off each other. He likes table tennis, without being much good at it. He’s a bit frivolous, frankly. I don’t think he’s married. He can be forgetful (as I can: I’d forgotten, until the review of by the same author reminded me, that I once described CBe as ‘a small machine for reading aloud to strangers’). He’s not good at joining things up (he can just about do joined-up handwriting). He has a problem with endings. (A review remarks on how many of the paragraphs – ‘It’s hard to describe these sequent pages as “episodes”’ – don’t so much end as simply stop: ‘Robinson’s paragraphs run for as long as their thoughts do, and then stop running’.) He’s stubborn: knowing that he’s not a ‘natural’ novelist/poet/journalist, he still insists on writing
http://sonofabook.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/on-jack-robinson.html

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