2 items that are well worth a look
David Blackburn 6:11pm
I passed several balmy summer holidays as a child buried in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. I read it four or five times aged between 9 and 12 and it remains a favourite. What a tale of derring-do and injustice. It reads at the frenetic pace of a James Ellroy novel, and with characters as evocative as Pete Bondurant et al: a pantomime villain in Uncle Ebenezer, the determined David Balfour and the dashing, almost absurdly clichéd romantic, Alan Breck Stewart – I can only imagine the effect he would have had on childhood’s febrile imagination had I been a girl.
Anyway, I did not know that Stevenson nicked his plot from the tragic life of James Annesley, robbed of his right to five aristocratic titles by the brokeback-esque figure of ‘Uncle Dick’. The subject of a new biography, Jon Henley has the story in the Guardian.
Also, the BBC is running a poetry season. The website is hardly ground breaking, but it is quite good fun: recorded readings, small biographical details and the like. It's a good way to kill five minutes.
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Jeremy
February 24th, 2010 8:13pm Report this commentNice illustration - who's that by, I wonder?
"It reads at the frenetic pace of a James Ellroy novel..."
I rather think that should be the other way around, if it applies at all...
I've never read Kidnapped. Nor Treasure Island...although that latter does have the most wonderfully evocative first page. He's good with names, isn't he? Blind Pew, Squire Trelawney, Doctor Livesey, Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins....in addition to the ones mentioned by yourself.
How, I wonder, do the two books compare?
There was a BBC TV (I think) adaptation of Kidnapped a few years back. I know it's got Paul McGann and Gregor Fisher in it...but I have no idea what the quality of the drama itself is like...
Also, back in the late 1940s Mervyn Peake did some superb illustrations for an edition of Treasure Island. They are well worth looking at if you have never seen them...
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