To get me back into the habit of reading regularly, I went back to my favourite book as a child and the one that started my love adventure stories- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. 

(Photo is my original copy, which is nearly 30 years old and my newer once, which was a present from my partner-can you tell, which is which?)

Robert Louis Stevenson came up with idea of pirates and buried gold, when trying to keep his stepson entertained during a wet, summers day-no DisneyPlus in 1881. It tells the story of Jim Hawkins, a boy in his early teens, who lives at the Admiral Benbow Inn with his mother and father on the South West coast of England. One day an old sailor, called Billy Bones, turns up at the Inn looking for a place to stay and the rest as they say is history. What follows is everything is everything you need in pirate story, perhaps because it is where we get most of our lore about pirates from. There is a map, buried treasure, mutiny, a tropical island, a parrot and the most famous pirate of all, Long John Silver. It is also where some of supposed ‘folklore’ regarding pirates come from, such treasure maps, walking the plank and black spots, from.

What I loved about the book and what I still love to this day, is that throughout you feel as you yourself are going on the adventure. You can feel the excitement building as Jim gets ready to leave for the island, only for the excitement to be replaced dread once people start showing their true colours. Maybe because when I first read the book it was on a particular hot day in Canada, I have always felt the obsessive heat of the island coming right off the page.  

Long John Silver is perhaps the most famous character from the book and is the inspiration for all future fictional portrayals of pirates. However, Silver in the book is a lot more than ‘Aha Jim lad’ caricature and is actually a character, who is both charming and sinister. Also, whilst many movies play on a father/son aspect of Silver and Jim’s relationship, I feel it is more ambiguous in the book. 

One thing that annoyed a child and still annoys me now, is that lack of female characters. There is only three-Jim’s mum, Silver’s wife, who is never seen and Dr Livesey’s maid (who thanks to watching endless Catherine Cookson adaptions as a child, I was convinced her and Doctor were sleeping together), who appears and disappears after one line. Jim’s mum does give a very good speech denouncing the cowardness of the men in the village but then later faints at the sight of trouble.

It is worth mentioning that when you read the book as an adult you may have a slightly different view on some of Jim’s actions. As a child doing rash, impulsive things can make perfect sense in to you. But reading them as I an adult, I did spend a lot of time thinking of ‘what the Hell are you doing’ and imagining Dr Livesey and the Squire muttering ‘for f***sake’ under their breath throughout the book. This that in mind, I can see what author, John Drake was going when he made Jim the rival in his retelling The Traitor of Treasure Island but that’s a review for another day. But I don’t think Jim is the villain, it’s more that I am kind of despairing of him! However, if you have not yet read this novel, do not despair of him too much and enjoy this classic adventure tale.