Robert Louis Stevenson "Cruising"

"Living with him one feels a possibility of a life infinitely more free," wrote the Anglo-Florentine writer and critic Vernon Lee in 1900 about her own immersive and liberating experience of reading Robert Louis Stevenson's works. Drawing upon the current interest in the impact of life writing and travel writing on fiction, Oliver Buckton's Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative and the Colonial Body handsomely opens up the expansive imaginative vistas of Stevenson's oeuvre. Bringing together critically undervalued works with some of his most acclaimed fiction under a deliberately inclusive interpretative approach, Buckton examines his "preoccupation with the pleasures and perils of travel and the pivotal influence of location on literary production." Throughout the book, Buckton uses the term "cruising" in at least three senses: to describe Stevenson's method of travelling (leisurely, desultory, immersive), to denote his dependence on travel for the composition of his books, and more boldly, to glance at the utility of the current sexual sense of word—actively travelling with, or for, same-sex partners.

Buckton's study is divided into eight chapters, each focusing largely on a single text. Chapter one offers an ambitious reading of The Wrong Box (1889) as a parable of homoerotic panic, suggesting that reviewers' "disgust at the fictional corpse" central to the plot of the novel is also "symptomatic of a deeper unease with the production of desire that cannot be contained by the familiar boxes of character and narrative closure, such as inheritance and marriage." The second chapter provides a detailed analysis of Stevenson's second travel book, Travels with a Donkey (1877); Buckton notes that his "ongoing conflict" with the recalcitrant donkey, Modestine, suggests his inability to accommodate both the domestic and the feminine. "Travel, for Stevenson," Buckton cogently remarks, was "both an escape from his parental family and a deferral of commitment to a new family," and he discusses the potentially sadomasochistic impulses of his brief excursus in bachelordom with some dexterity; the parallel Buckton draws between Stevenson's sometimes sadistic treatment of Modestine and the fictional depiction of Hyde's pleasure in inflicting bestial cruelty in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde nearly a decade later is disturbingly compelling.

Chapter three provides a skilful reading of both the textual and paratextual material of Treasure Island, which Buckton terms "Stevenson's first commodity-text," although his interpretation of the book as the locus of a "homosocial community of readers" is contentious. (Kate Flint has amply demonstrated that many girls preferred to read the Boy's Own Paper to their own targeted, female adolescent magazines—and Stevenson had many female readers.) Chapter four continues the exploration of implicit and unvoiced same-sex love in its reading of the relationship between David and Alan in Kidnapped; Buckton astutely draws a parallel between its irresolution of plot and narrative and Stevenson's own discomfort with its implications. In some of the book's most cogent analysis, in chapters five and six Buckton purposefully examines Stevenson's first South Seas writing, commenting that the "heterogeneity of materials and methods" is one of its most salient features. Buckton's assessment that Stevenson's fictional depiction of the white colonial administrator Attwater in The Ebb-Tide was substantially based upon the real Gilbert Island paramount chief, Tembinok, is impressive. Finally, chapters seven and eight uncover the close proximity and interdependence of the two most important disciplines in Stevenson's late fiction: history and romance. Buckton solidly locates the mediation of Stevenson's fiction from Samoa to his British readers in the author's unresolved tension between artistic veracity and the demands of the literary marketplace.

Buckton's imaginative deployment of the concept of "cruising" does have its drawbacks. "Stevenson's approach to travel" and to travel writing, Buckton writes, was "transformed over time, as the circle of his wandering widened with his increasing independence from his parents and improved economic circumstances." By suggesting a relatively uncomplicated trajectory from adolescent...