I quite enjoyed writing my last present tense book review, and I think it made me consider the book with a more critical eye. So I’m doing it again with Huck Finn, by Mark Twain. I can very vaguely remember it being on TV, but all I can recall is Huck trying to get out of whitewashing a picket fence – not very exciting.
I’ve read the first nine chapters, and it’s going along nicely, although the adventures so far have been entertaining rather than hugely exciting. But now Huck and Jim have just been thrown together, it feels like the novel is hitting its stride. I think perhaps it has taken me a while to get into the correct frame of ear to get caught up in the story – Huck narrates in Southern dialect, and the other characters speak in variants of it. This gives a real immediacy to the story; Huck narrates in the past tense, but there’s a fair bit of present tense dialogue, which you can’t appreciate until you adjust to the language. It’s not much of stretch once you get going, though.
So, a decent start, then, with some wryly amusing characters – I think the more I read, the more I’m going to enjoy it.
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