Erewhon Revisited by Samuel Butler

  Back in May, I read Erewhon by Samuel Butler, which is essentially a fictional travelogue where the main character documents the Erewhonian way of life. In the first volume, there are a number of treatises interspersed, documenting their beliefs regarding economics, life and death, religion, and so forth. Erewhon Revisited is much more straightforward as a novel; it documents the protagonist’s return to Erewhon and subsequent return home, where he tells his son everything that has happened. It seems rare that the sequel is so different from the original—here, we have more characters, more action, more of a complete narrative.

Here’s the premise in a nutshell: the protagonist returns to Erewhon, to find it much changed. He arrives to find himself amongst ominous statues and he encounters two strangers—Hanky and Panky. Their mannerisms reveal that he is ill-prepared: his dress is no longer the Erewhonian style; he hunts and eats partridges (which is against the law); he discovers that any foreigners are immediately thrown into the “Blue Pool” with no questions asked—murdered by drowning. Through a series of clever maneuvers, the protagonist, Higgs, tricks Hanky and Panky into believing that he is the ranger authority over the preserve and encourages them to eat the partridges, too, rendering them equally complicit. When Higgs arrives to town, he finds that the Erewhonian culture now revolves around a religion called Sunchildism. As it turns out, at the end of the first book (twenty years earlier) when he departed Erewhon in a hot air balloon with his stolen bride, it prompted a revolution in their attitudes and they now worship him, though Butler lampoons the veracity of religious conviction—the Erewhonians get his story wrong and there is no consensus on what he actually was ‘preaching.’ Conveniently, they are creating a new temple dedicated to him and, through a series of coincidences (including that Higgs had a long-lost son with his sister-in-law), he is in a position to declare himself the actual Sunchild. From there, there is a bunch of legalese rigamarole to bring the false prophets to justice and allow the Sunchild to escape. The book is somewhat of a thought experiment regarding the second coming of Jesus: what if Jesus were to return and try to correct the errors his worshippers have made since his departure?

Being from 1870s, the style of the book will likely present to modern readers as “stuffy”. The language is formal. The sentence structures are elaborate, replete with multiple subordinate clauses, sometimes stretching for multiple pages as the author, Samuel Butler, navigates the complexities of Erewhonian culture relative to others, and in particular, British society. (See what I did there?).

I don’t have a lot of thoughtful commentary about the book. The best I can say is that the novel is more engaging than its predecessor in that it is more story-driven. The pace is still on the slower side, which the narrator acknowledges around page 600, often going into more detail than I think is really necessary. The suspense before the temple dedication is pretty fun, but it gets overdrawn when in the lead-up there is a full diagram of the temple with a full description of the different areas of the temple and where everyone was seated. Most of those details weren’t necessary for the drama of the scene and served mainly to deflate it.

I also have a few minor gripes about the sequencing of the book. More than once, there is a dramatic moment that is narrated in reverse: we are told the outcome and then we see the events that led there. It’s kind of similar to Lord of the Rings in that sense: the suspense gets sucked out when we know in advance that Gandalf escaped the Balrog, for example. There’s something to be said for not burying the lead, but there’s something more to be said for letting the story take its course.

Overall, the book (and the duology) is alright. I think a more thorough study of the text in an academic setting would provide some more layers to appreciate the text. I think the satire of the text would shine through a little more if I knew the ins and outs of British politics at the time. Instead, I’ll just live in ignorance and console myself with the fact that I’ve read a minor classic.

Happy reading!