Book Review: "James" by Percival Everett

“With my pencil I wrote myself into being. I wrote myself to here.”

- James by Percival Everett

I have been waiting for this book for a long time. When it came out, I initially decided not to get it because it was fairly expensive. Having read some of the other books of the same author, I actually could not wait for James to be released. I was absolutely itching even though it was out of my price range. However, I ended up buying it when it came down in price slightly from a bookshop and ultimately, got to reading it when I arrived back home. From reading one of the best novels of the last 10 years, The Trees, and other great books like Damned if I do, Percival Everett is proving to be a really exciting voice in the world of literary fiction. In James, he takes one of my favourite novels: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and writes the first person narrative of one of the most intense and carefully crafted characters in American Literature: Jim.

It starts off Jim's story in the same way that Twain's book does; when there is an intention of selling Jim down to someone in New Orleans and thus splitting him from his family - Jim runs away hoping to access the river and get to the free states. He will look after his family by comin back with some means to get them out, but does not know yet how dangerous the journey is going to be and does not want to risk their lives as well as his own. Jim is a cautious man, afraid of the possibility that he may never see his family ever again and so, makes it his business to see them. The first person narrative of this journey is a refreshing change from Twain's novel which, though it is amazing, would leave us thinking about the mind and emotions of Jim.

“How strange a world, how strange an existence, that that one’s equal must argue for one’s equality, that one’s equal must hold a station that allows airing of an argument, that one cannot make that argument for oneself, that premises of said argument must be vetted by those equals who do not agree.”

- James by Percival Everett

As the novel progresses, it moves away from the original source material and gives us some new insights into the character - one in which maybe Jim will have to survive without the companionship of Huckleberry Finn. He reads books in secret and, when he makes it to Chicago, they are surprised that a man once a slave could read and write efficiently as he could. I found this to be one of the great talents of Jim: he was well read and intelligent. It is something that is not really explored much in the source material and yet, you could always feel it was there. In this book, this is explored through the fact that Jim has these imagined conversations on philosophy and racism, he thinks about people like Kierkegaard and he has musings on what his life actually means in accordance to the books he has been reading - applying what he knows to his situation. It is a grand achievement of his character.

One of the scenes I thought was pretty great in this book is when we see Jim teaching his daughter and the other enslaves children near the beginning of the novel about coded speech and slave dialect. A necessary way for survival it really highlights Jim's propensity for language and his ability to manipulate language to do good instead of bad. They can communicate well amongst themselves, but in front of the white people they put on this slave dialect in which they dumb themselves down and they allow the white person to always be correct about everything - even when they are wrong (and it is often). It is something that Jim uses to ensure the survival of his family and the other families on the land. This is one of the main things that shows us as readers that Jim is truly a person who tries to protect people from harm's way even if they are in harm's way already.

As the book moves on, the relations between Huck and Jim change and morph from the original novel and it becomes far more complex then we would have initially thought. The ending is hinted at from the very beginning but without reading the whole book, there is no way of knowing how it happens because it is removed from what we know of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A novel which concentrates on one of the most interesting characters in all of literary history, I do wonder when we are going to see something quite as great as this ever again.