My eight-year-old son has clear ideas about what makes a story. “There has to be a problem,” he’ll remind me if he thinks I’m skimping on my narrative duties. A hero sets out on a quest, but before he can get the treasure (or whatever) and brush aside the baddies, there must be (and here’s the rub for the harassed parent) all manner of setbacks and reversals. It can’t be a walk in the park: there has to be an obstacle, or preferably several.
Andrew Motion’s elegant, affectionate homage to Robert Louis Stevenson is straight out of this classic adventure-story mould. At the book’s magical opening in 1802, we find Jim Hawkins Jr living on the banks of the Thames, exploring the marshes as boys do, and of an evening listening to his father, in the tap-room of the inn he now runs, telling tales of his boyhood adventures aboard the Hispaniola and how he battled pirates and got his treasure. And then, one moonlit night, a small boat draws up at the jetty beside the inn. Aboard is a strange and mysterious girl who has come to seek young Jim out: she is none other than Natty, the daughter of Jim’s father’s old nemesis, the infamous Long John Silver. She bears a summons to young Jim from Silver, and a proposal: that, with a ship and crew supplied by her father, they should set out to recover the portion of the loot that had been abandoned all those years before on Treasure Island.
And so the baton is passed — from father to son, from father to daughter and from Stevenson to Motion. The bookshops are already groaning with pastiches, sequels and in-the-style-ofs, and the appearance of yet another cannot help but elicit a small groan from a cynical reviewer. But the first thing to be said about Motion’s novel is that from the opening pages it is clear that it is no slapdash cashing-in exercise, but a piece of writing born of genuine love and respect for the original. If there are reservations, they lie in a different direction.
This care and attention is particularly evident in the opening part (The Temptation), which sets up young Jim’s world and its interruption by Natty’s call to adventure. As one might expect, the descriptions (in the first person, with Jim looking back many years later) are full of deft visual touches. When Jim first stands on the docks, he sees rising above the crowd of vessels “myriad masts — some slender, some brutish, some as high as steeples, and all supporting so many hundreds of pieces of rigging the sky actually seemed dark with them”. That may not sound like much quoted alone, but that is partly the point. Motion appreciates the value of patiently accumulated detail over flashy style when it comes to creating atmosphere. Only in the wonderfully lurid portrait of the bed-ridden but still fearsome Silver does he allow himself a Dickensian flourish.
And so Jim and Natty set off over the waves on a ship commanded by a Captain Beamish, who has “bright blue eyes that might have been made of salt water and sunlight”, and who is as stolid and oak-of-old-England dependable as his name. There are problems during the passage — a calm and a murder, to name but two — but eventually they reach the Caribbean and are approaching the place that has so filled their childish imaginations: Treasure Island.
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But the further Motion gets from his wonderful opening, the more the uneasy feeling grows that the novel is not quite fulfilling that initial promise. It is nothing to do with the writing, which remains assured and absorbing. The weakness is more in the plotting — or shortage of it. On arriving at the island, Jim and Natty (now disguised as a boy) discover it still inhabited by the pirates left behind by the previous expedition — a brutish and sadistic lot — along with some miserable slaves they have captured. So there, at least, Motion gives his protagonists a problem. There are others, too, but they are slightly too predictable and easily overcome. The narrative cries out for a significant twist of the plot — a betrayal, perhaps — and, when it comes to swashbuckling, more of the kind of clever last-minute reversals that Hollywood action films pile on with such abandon. Adults, nostalgic for their own childhood reading, will admire Motion’s craftsmanship. But I haven’t shown it to my son yet: eight-year-olds can be more severe critics.
Cape £12.99/ebook £13.56 pp404, ST Bookshop price £11.69
Andrew Motion is at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Sunday, April 1. To book tickets, visit oxfordliteraryfestival.org