Reviews for The Native Son

The average rating for The Native Son based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-07-14 00:00:00 Annne Garces (Stevenson's home at Vailima,Samoa) For those who know a bit of his biography...Stevenson the Scotsman writer had been for his lifetime a world drifter. He'd been in America too (in San Francisco!),... ...before settling in Samoa, for the rest of his life. So, this novel apparently has biographical lines, enmeshed into it. He knew what it meant "new horizons". Three miserable-looking-and-feeling outcasts gather in one of the Pacific isles of Tahiti. They're Robert Herrick, American Captain Davis and Huish. The poor starving men sit under the Purao tree, nearby the beach contemplating past and future,... if any. R. Harry, the most refined of them all (still has in his pocket a book by Virgil, the poet), had had chances back in England: an Oxford scholarship …studies in music and metaphysics; but it all seems, he's blown it away. He finds himself face to face with a "career failure"; feeling incompetent,shy ….having dropped from his job as clerk in New York. He tried in San Francisco streets…no success: he became a beggar….a skulker. Last resort for the remainder dollar: change his name and embark on a ship to Papeete. But Papeete is hell again: raged by the Peru influenza . "[sick Huish] The most pitiable of them all": the London clerk, coughing continuously; a cockney clerk. -what would they do if…? Husih: if I had a "ring to rub" or "raise Belzebub"? ….I would go to London travelling in the carpet of Mohamed Ben of the Arabian nights. On the horizon they've seen a schooner with a yellow flag: the sign of pestilence. They're strolling the beach like "lame geese". Luckily, they find someone who provided them with a breakfast ("eaten with the greed of hounds") in a small "dingy schooner" with five kanakas. Now, they're at their "place": the calaboose. The captain managed to get them paper "to write home". Herrick tries his wording: "forget about me…I have failed in life….I'm well and happy"…in his letter to Emma. Captain Davis reveals his true name: I'm john Davis: the sea ranger. Huish: "I had got rich and married a queen in the islands". But he tore it into pieces. Herrick is the most desperate it all seems: he's written on the walls: "destiny knocking at the door" a famous phrase from the 5th symphony, he explains to Davis. Herrick should have stayed in England. Better to die at home. In the midst of all this desperation captain Davis shows up with a solution: he's been invited to take over the Farallone, the yellow flag schooner whose captain died of small pox. He tells Herrick about his plan: though the champagne cargo is meant to Australia ("Sydney will never see me!")… he's set to sell the ship when arriving to Peru. Quite reluctantly Herrick agrees. New horizons parading for the trio….they've just left Tahiti. Though a "landsman", now Herrick is Faralonne's shipmate. "'My name is Attwater,' continued the stranger. 'You, I presume, are the captain?' ... Twenty-nine,' said Attwater. 'Twenty-nine deaths and thirty-one cases, out of thirty-three souls upon the island.'That's a strange way to calculate, Mr Hay, is it not? Souls! I never say it but it startles me.' ... 'There can be no reason why I should affect the least degree of secrecy about my island,' returned Attwater... 'What brought you here to the South Seas?' he asked presently. 'Many things,' said Attwater. 'Youth, curiosity, romance, the love of the sea, and (it will surprise you to hear) an interest in missions. ...But religion is a savage thing, like the universe it illuminates; savage, cold, and bare, but infinitely strong.' "

Review # 2 was written on 2020-02-12 00:00:00 Kenneth Lemaster 'The isle'the undiscovered, the scarce believed-in'now lay before them and close aboard; and Herrick thought that never in his dreams had he beheld anything more strange and delicate. The beach was excellently white, the continuous barrier of trees inimitably green; the land perhaps ten feet high, the trees thirty more. Every here and there, as the schooner coasted northward, the wood was intermitted; and he could see clear over the inconsiderable strip of land (as a man looks over a wall) to the lagoon within'and clear over that again to where the far side of the atoll prolonged its pencilling of trees against the morning sky. He tortured himself to find analogies. The isle was like the rim of a great vessel sunken in the waters; it was like the embankment of an annular railway grown upon with wood: so slender it seemed amidst the outrageous breakers, so frail and pretty, he would scarce have wondered to see it sink and disappear without a sound, and the waves close smoothly over its descent.'