Luke Jennings – Treasure Island
Luke Jennings is a British author and journalist. He trained as a dancer at Rambert School before becoming a dance critic for The Observer. Jennings has written for many publications, such as The New Yorker, Time, and Vanity Fair. He debuted as a novelist in 1993 with Breach Candy, followed by Atlantic in 1995, which was nominated for the Booker Prize. He later co-wrote two YA novels, Stars and Stars: Stealing the Show, with his daughter Laura. In 2015, Jennings released Codename Villanelle, a comic spy thriller, which inspired the BBC hit series Killing Eve.
“In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jim Hawkins departs Bristol in a schooner, the Hispaniola, bound for the Caribbean Sea. Jim is an inkeeper’s son who serves ale to the local sailors and excise-men, and has never left his Devon home. Now, armed with a treasure-map, he and his shipmates will journey to the other side of the earth, to a place of lethal danger and exotic grandeur. A place of tropical heat, thundering surf and blinding white sands. A place of the imagination.
The Hispaniola sets sail in Chapter ten of Treasure Island. The plot has developed by then; we’ve met desperate characters and had ominous encounters. But the departure from Bristol has always been the hook for me. It’s the point at which Jim, in his new identity as the ship’s cabin boy, is lifted from the life he knows and launched into the unknown.
But soon the anchor was short up; soon it was hanging dripping at the bows; soon the sails began to draw, and the land and shipping to flit by on either side; and before I could lie down to snatch an hour of slumber the Hispaniola had begun her voyage to the Isle of Treasure.
As a child of the fifties and sixties, I longed for the boring routines of home and school to be interrupted in this way. I yearned for a dimensional shift, one which would propel me into a parallel world, preferably one in which I wore a sword, or a least a dagger.
Sadly, it never happened. I never woke to find that I was a cabin boy bound for the South Seas, or a knight’s squire at Agincourt. If I spoke to animals, they stubbornly refused to speak back. If I opened a wardrobe door, there were just aertex shirts and mothballs.
All the books I loved had a pivotal moment, when reality was reshaped. In The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (Alan Garner, 1960), it’s when Colin and Susan find their way into the caverns and mineshafts of Alderley Edge, where a band of warriors is sleeping, waiting to be called forth for a final, existential battle against the forces of evil. In The Dark is Rising (Susan Cooper, 1973), it’s when Will Stanton discovers on his eleventh birthday that he’s a warrior for ‘The Light’, pledged to eternal conflict against ‘The Dark’.
In that flash, everything had changed. The snow was there, as it had been a moment before, but not piled now on roofs or stretching flat over lawns and fields. There were no roofs, there were no fields. There were only trees.
In The Box of Delights (John Masefield, 1935), Kay Harker is in a railway carriage, returning home from school for Christmas, when he is entrusted with a mysterious box and whirled into a series of strange, hazardous events.
The Punch and Judy man stood in the corner near the door, looking very white and tense, as though the earth were about to open.
‘So, Master Harker,’ the old man said, ‘we always used to say, ‘It’s the snow that brings the wolves out.’ Many a bitter night did we stand the wolf-guard. Now here, once more, they’re running. We must stand to our spears.
Another favourite of mine was John Verney’s Friday’s Tunnel (1959) which sees February and Friday Callendar, the children of an eccentric MP, stumbling upon a Cold War conspiracy when Friday begins tunnelling beneath their house. I read it more times than I could count. The novel falls squarely into the category of children’s books in which the veil of the ordinary is torn away, and the extraordinary revealed.
CS Lewis achieved this brilliantly in the Narnia novels. The scene (in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 1950) in which the musty old coats in a wardrobe are parted to reveal a snow-bound forest, is such a familiar one, at least to readers of a certain age, that it’s easy to overlook the brilliance of the conception. Lewis effects similar transformations throughout the novels. I particularly loved the opening chapter of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) in which the Pevensey children are drawn into a painting of a ship hanging on a bedroom wall, and find themselves swaying on deck with the salt spray blowing in their faces.
The stories I loved didn’t shy away from violence, either physical or psychological. February Callendar, the thirteen year-old narrator of Friday’s Tunnel (a Puffin book), casually mentions
…a girl from school called Helen Ponton whom I always tease because she’s so fat and stupid and awful and whose parents were killed last year in an air-crash and who has no brothers and sisters or proper home but spends every hols with a maiden aunt in a bed-sitting room in Leamington Spa.
It’s unlikely that a twenty-first century Puffin heroine would admit to such thoughts. The body-count in Treasure Island is staggering, and the teenaged Jim Hawkins contributes to it cheerfully and substantially. Years later he recalls the horrors of the place.
The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts or start upright in bed with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’
For children’s adventure to grip, it must be intense. C.S, Lewis’s White Witch gave me nightmares, but I couldn’t stop returning to her icy kingdom. When Jim Hawkins shins up the Hispaniola’s mizzen mast, pursued by the vengeful Israel Hands, I knew as Jim knew that the scene could only end with a killing.
To be scared out of your skin by a story is no bad thing, and I now see that these stories were signs and portents. They taught me that not all transformations are physical. That the imagination is a boundless ocean, and I could set sail for the Isle of Treasure whenever I chose.
Thank you to Luke Jennings for recommending these books!
Our Books of the Month are sent to our projects with a bookplate sharing why it was chosen. You can order your copy of Treasure Island and our previous Books of the Month from our affiliate list on Bookshop.org:
Books purchased through our Bookshop affiliate links earn Give a Book a small commission, which supports our projects and helps us give books to those who need them most. Thank you for supporting Give a Book!
To see our previous Books of the Month, click here.
Photo credit: Laura Jennings