Erewhon by Samuel Butler

I guess this is what I get for reading a book solely because someone, somewhere, made an oblique reference to it. I can't even recall where I heard of it. Somehow, nevertheless, I got the idea the book was worth my time, which prejudiced it in my favor. I dearly wanted to like it. But a sense of the foreboding fell over me when, in the preface to the revised edition, the author admitted, "I have found it an irksome task to take up work which I thought I had got rid of thirty years ago, and much of which I am ashamed of..."

Erewhon, in its entirety, feels derivative, in part because it is, but also because so many others have gleaned inspiration from it. In the best style of Gulliver's Travels, Butler strands his protagonist in a strange society through whose unconventional manners and mores we are ostensibly to see the foibles of our own. Drawing also on Thomas More's Utopia and predating Huxley and Orwell, Butler attempts what others have done, or will go on to do, much more successfully.

The beginning is bogged down in exposition and the adventures and aspirations of a poorly drawn protagonist. This man stumbles upon the Erewhonians and becomes their, albeit well-treated, captive. He details the oddities of Erewhon, from their aversion to machines and progress, to their severe punishment of physical ailment, to their nominal forms of religion. Butler employs thick, ambiguous metaphor and his voice is often indiscernible. At points it is hard to determine whether he is mocking society through his protagonist, or mocking the protagonist himself as society. I wouldn't doubt it to be both. Butler attacks from so many sides that he seems to prevail on none.

Altogether I think I missed the boat on the satire. In fact, I think that boat set sail when Butler died. Much of his wit now seems inapplicable, having faded along with the Victorian times it set to skewer. The book's inability to transcend time is, in all probability, its chiefest shortcoming.

Butler himself, from what I can gather, was a tortured, confused man swept up in the prevailing winds of turn-of-the-century intellectualism, unable to find a tenable basis in either religion or materialism, and so, being neither hot nor cold, as it were, was incapable of forming definite beliefs, resulting in a literary work as muddled as his mind.