The Teller of Tales: In Search of Robert Louis Stevenson (Literary Roads)

Rating:
Summary: A piece of irresponsible hackwork
Review: Davies is a lazy researcher and an even lazier note-taker: nearly every passage from Stevenson in this book is misquoted, often distoring Stevenson's meaning. (See my online review in the Boston Book Review). Don't buy this awful book, read Stevenson's wonderful letters instead.

Rating:
Summary: PAPARAZZI STEVENSON
Review: Hunter Davies is a strange writer. His most popular book, on the Beatles, has the crudity of Pacific Art, but is no less enjoyable for that. He's not "literature", but he boasts a lack of selfconsciousness - in fact, wallows in it - that borders on viable stylism. In tackling Robert Louis Stevenson his technique is similarly informal and it similarly works. Stevenson, of course, is great literature, but he was also a focussed populist and one of the truly great pure storytellers of all time. You can't dip into Stevenson. To really enjoy him you follow the full presciption, from Travels with a Donkey to the Letters. His oeuvre is a rainbow display of unparalleled imagination and brute energy (it has been said his prolificacy killed him), and it invites just such a quirky, jaunty imagination as Davies' in analytical engagement. Davies travelled in RLS's track through Europe, to San Francisco, Hawaii and Samoa and presents his quasi-biography as a journal "in the field". The text is peppered with letters "to Louis" in the modern idiom, informing him of the societal and cultural changes in 100 years in the places of his childhood and adventuring. There are mad cameos, and some surprisingly elegant writing (he is good on Calistoga and SF and Hawaii), and what emerges is a totally fresh paparazzi picture of Stevenson as a hefty soul in a fragile body living a jampacked life. No, it isn't "accurate". There are "generous" interpretations of RLS's own journal writings and passages of wild conjecture. But it is, as it proffers to be, a work of imagination - and RLS, who had humor to burn, would have loved it.

Rating:
Summary: PAPARAZZI STEVENSON
Review: Hunter Davies is a strange writer. His most popular book, on the Beatles, has the crudity of Pacific Art, but is no less enjoyable for that. He's not "literature", but he boasts a lack of selfconsciousness - in fact, wallows in it - that borders on viable stylism. In tackling Robert Louis Stevenson his technique is similarly informal and it similarly works. Stevenson, of course, is great literature, but he was also a focussed populist and one of the truly great pure storytellers of all time. You can't dip into Stevenson. To really enjoy him you follow the full presciption, from Travels with a Donkey to the Letters. His oeuvre is a rainbow display of unparalleled imagination and brute energy (it has been said his prolificacy killed him), and it invites just such a quirky, jaunty imagination as Davies' in analytical engagement. Davies travelled in RLS's track through Europe, to San Francisco, Hawaii and Samoa and presents his quasi-biography as a journal "in the field". The text is peppered with letters "to Louis" in the modern idiom, informing him of the societal and cultural changes in 100 years in the places of his childhood and adventuring. There are mad cameos, and some surprisingly elegant writing (he is good on Calistoga and SF and Hawaii), and what emerges is a totally fresh paparazzi picture of Stevenson as a hefty soul in a fragile body living a jampacked life. No, it isn't "accurate". There are "generous" interpretations of RLS's own journal writings and passages of wild conjecture. But it is, as it proffers to be, a work of imagination - and RLS, who had humor to burn, would have loved it.