Everyone has a little bit of the twelve-year-old boy in them. Unfortunately, my twelve-year-old boy was into computer games, not adventure on the high seas. Of all the novels I read this year, this was both the shortest and hardest. I just didn’t care. I didn’t care about Crusoe taming the goats or making his raisins or building his summer home. There are lots of film adaptations but I couldn’t find the interest to watch any of them, even the one with the hairy Pierce Brosnan. I found the Wikipedia entry more interesting than the book, which is a terrible thing to say. I did care about Friday, but everything about the character is depressing.
One day, walking up the same hill, but the weather being hazy at sea, so that we could not see the continent, I called to him, and said, “Friday, do not you wish yourself in your own country, your own nation?” “Yes,” he said, “I be much O glad to be at my own nation.” “What would you do there?” said I. “Would you turn wild again, eat men’s flesh again, and be a savage as you were before?” He looked full of concern, and shaking his head, said, “No, no, Friday tell them to live good; tell them to pray God; tell them to eat corn-bread, cattle flesh, milk; no eat man again.”
Friday needs to get moving on that, because in a few years that entire nation will be exterminated. On the other hand, corn-bread is pretty good.