Stories, Dreams, Stevenson
A snapshot review of Alberto Manguel's Stevenson Under the Palm Trees.
Samoa, Stevenson himself, a visitor from the home country, a broad-rimmed hat, a murder, a dream, deaths by fire, a killing: a story worthy of Tusitala, the teller of tales.
Alberto Manguel's Stevenson Under the Palm Trees is as much a homage to RLS as it a work of originality. To describe it as a 'literary whodunnit' is to misrepresent it, though it is certainly a literary creation in the tradition of Stevenson, combining elements of mystery and suspense.
Some faithful readers of RLS might thoroughly dislike Manguel's novella and dismiss it as cheap and frivolous; more imaginative readers will probably take delight in this work and appreciate what it is that Manguel has created.
Like many of the writings of the sublime Borges - a fellow-Argentinian and great aficionado of RLS - Manguel's novella also takes us into a dream-world, where life, like the story he creates, is acted out in another dimension. Indeed, it was the otherness of the dimension in which Stevenson operated that Borges had in mind when he described Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as an 'allegorical tale that pretends to be a detective story.' Had Borges read Stevenson Under the Palm Trees he would have had to make the same claim for this remarkable little tale.
Stevenson Under the Palm Trees by Alberto Manguel, Canongate, 2005, ISBN 1841955981 (99pp, £5.99 pbk)
© Michael Lister 2005