A ripping good yarn

From a review of Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson:

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) belongs at the head of a select company of writers renowned in their day—Alexandre ­Dumas, Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—who are no longer taken seriously, or for that matter read much, by most adults. However, the pleasures of reading adventure stories are not all guilty ones. The very best of such tales not only entertain but also teach—­reminding grown men and women of fundamental truths they took in when young. ....

Treasure Island portrays an adolescent’s initiation into the depths of manly wickedness—and his boldness in fighting against it. The sinister forces that generally flee the daylight penetrate the peaceable life of young Jim Hawkins. A succession of seafaring ruffians, each more rotten than the previous—Billy Bones, Black Dog, Blind Pew—arrive at his father’s inn, and bring with them terror and bloodshed, as they pursue the notorious pirate Captain Flint’s buried treasure. Pelf, loot, plunder: That is what pirates live and die for. But this fascination with riches infects the good men whom Jim knows, and with Flint’s treasure map in their possession a select group of them heads out to sea in quest of a fortune.

They are all innocents, with a lot to learn about the nature of evil. Squire Trelawney, the ringleader, unwittingly hires a crew of pirates who had sailed with Flint, among them Long John Silver, the peg-legged archvillain who has become the favorite buccaneer of popular legend. At first, they strike the Squire as virtuous men; but appearances can be fatefully deceiving, as Jim learns more quickly than his adult companions. Having climbed into a barrel on deck to get one of the few apples remaining there, Jim overhears Silver feverishly tell his fellow cutthroats of his plan to murder the good men—he imagines the most exquisite mutilations for the Squire—and take all the treasure for themselves. As Jim tells the story, “I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the ­extreme of fear and curiosity, for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.”

One lesson after another in maintaining his composure will follow. The pirates and the honest men will go to war, and several will be killed. Perhaps the biggest excitement comes when Jim fights to the death with the malignant Israel Hands. In a tour de force of practical criticism, Damrosch captures perfectly, sentence by sentence, the intricate and unrelenting narrative movement that renders the violent action, right down to the killing blow. ....

And for all that, it is a ripping good yarn, like Stevenson’s other most remarkable works of fiction. Each of these is singular in plot, but all are similar in their fundamental teaching: that righteous men must resist wrongdoers with all the courage they have, especially when the vicious have superior strength.

In Kidnapped (1886), seventeen-­year-old David Balfour, another slow learner, narrowly escapes a murderous pitfall contrived by his malicious, miserly uncle Ebenezer—yet still trusts the old reprobate enough to be suckered aboard a ship manned by evildoers, whom Ebenezer has paid to transport him into indentured servitude in the Carolinas. David, too, will have to fight for his life, and is fortunate to have at his side an expert ­swordsman who will become his fast friend. .... (more)

Algis Valiunas, "Stevenson’s Treasure," First Things, Jan 21, 2026.