I thought I would give a quick update on my progress with the 2022 online classics reading challenge I decided to join, as described in a previous post. This month's challenge was to read an unfinished novel by a famous author, and I chose to read The Narrative of John Smith, a lesser known unfinished work by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. For some reason I thought this would be a quick read and I had plans to read other unfinished works by other authors, but it actually took me the entire month just to finish this one. This early work is very different from Conan Doyle's other writings, which tend to be more action-oriented. In this novel, an older man, confined to his room with gout, philosophizes about many aspects of life and interacts with those few people who come to visit while he is confined - below is a better description from The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia website, where the novel is available to read free online (see title link above):
"Arthur Conan Doyle lost the manuscript of his first novel, and later professed horror at the thought that it should be found and published. As we now know, he rewrote much of it from memory, and "The Narrative of John Smith" has indeed been published. As it stands, it's not a long book, and next to nothing happens. I doubt it would have seen print in the 1880s, but now we're familiar with the author's life and work, and we're interested to follow his development as a writer, a thinker and a person. John Smith, perhaps Conan Doyle's vision of himself as an older man, is confined to his room by gout; the narrative consists of his reflections on life and his conversations with his doctor, his neighbours, his landlady, and the local curate — characters who are depicted with a lively authenticity. Nowhere else in his fiction does Conan Doyle discourse on such a range of topics — politics, religion, philosophy and much more — with the boldness of youth and often with the wisdom of maturity..."
While this may not be considered on of Conan Doyle's better works, I found it fascinating because the narrator spends quite a bit of time predicting how the future will be different from his present day in 1888. Some of his predictions are quite prescient while some are spectacularly off the mark, as would be expected, but what is most interesting are his reasonings for those predictions. Also of interest is the views held by the narrator (and presumably Conan Doyle as well) as to race, religion, gender stereotypes, and other topics, most of which were presumably typical for the time but would be considered quite passé if not downright offensive now. I am not much of a history buff so it is good for me to read about these topics in a historical perspective, as it gives insights into how we view many of these subjects today.
I am really enjoying this reading challenge, but I think I am more than ready for April's topic, which is a classic adventure novel. My choice for April is The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. I have always loved the 1961 movie adaptation (watch it free online here) but have never read the novel upon which it is based, so it is high time I did so!
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