Eddie Hodges playing Huckleberry Finn in the 1960 film The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Eddie Hodges playing Huckleberry Finn in the 1960 film The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Photograph: Allstar/MGM/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar
Saci Lloyd
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.
When I first read Huckleberry Finn at age 13 or so I laughed out loud at this audacious introduction, immediately falling in love with the sheer exuberance of an author who nailed his ironic colours to the mast in such a bold fashion. Here was a man who didn’t take himself too seriously, I thought, and liked him on the spot. I still do, some 30 years later.
As Twain wrote in one of his notebooks, Huckleberry Finn was intended as a boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience” - that is to say, as someone reared amid such pervasive prejudice, that he had a hard time seeing through it. I offer no defence of Huck’s racist language, I speak here simply as one in awe of the author’s take-no-prisoners, bold-faced satire, and I believe that his decision to write people as they really are, warts and all, is at the heart of the book’s success. For Twain knew that if he could get his audience to believe in his characters, he could get them to like them, and if they liked them, he could lead his readers anywhere – even to a radical confrontation of race and prejudice, which was his real goal, despite the above notice.
The Carbon Diaries
Mark Twain was a great inspiration to me as I wrote my first novel, The Carbon Diaries; a fictional notebook penned by the supremely caustic 15-year old Laura Brown, during the first year of carbon rationing in London. I too wanted to explore a society where denial and ignorance, this time about the effects of climate change, were pervasive. And believe me, stupidity was the order of the day back then. Dubya was leading the US charge against the Kyoto treaty, the Chinese were opening a coal-fired plant every two seconds and nobody seemed to give a damn, apart from some yoghurt-knitting hippies who hadn’t paid taxes since 1973.
Mark Twain reclines on a sofa with a book. Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Mark Twain reclines on a sofa with a book. Photograph: CORBIS
Taking the fantastic Twain quote as my maxim,
Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company
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gave me the courage to pack the book with as many dreadful, selfish, scheming characters as I dared. From Laura’s AbFab mum to her permanently furious sister Kim, to the politically incorrect pensioner, Arthur – not a single person in the story cared about climate change. They all just wanted their sports cars, their gap years and their freedom back.
And above all, there was Laura Brown, the one trying to make sense of it all, with sound heart and deformed conscience. Looking back on her now, she feels an awful lot like me.
It's The End Of The World As We Know It
Saci Lloyd is the author of The Carbon Diaries, Momentum, which was shortlisted for the Guardian fiction prize, Quantum Drop and the first book in a new series, It’s The End of the World as We Know It. Buy It’s the End of the World as We Know It at the Guardian bookshop.
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