Book Renzo
Adventure Fiction
6 books in this genre
Adventure Fiction — Dumas, Stevenson, and the Great Nineteenth-Century Novels of the Journey
Adventure fiction as a genre reached its peak in the nineteenth century, when a combination of forces — expanding literacy, cheaper printing, the enormous scale of European colonial travel, and a public hungry for stories about worlds beyond their own — produced some of the most durable novels ever written. The best of them are still worth reading today, not because they're nostalgic, but because they hold up as novels: the plotting is precise, the characters are memorable, and the moral stakes are real.
The Book Renzo adventure fiction shelf features two of the tradition's giants.
The first is Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, published in 1844-46. It is, arguably, the greatest story of betrayal and long-game revenge ever written. The plot is famous: a young sailor named Edmond Dantès, on the eve of both a promotion and his wedding, is falsely denounced as a Bonapartist agent by three men who each stand to gain something from his ruin. He is arrested, imprisoned without trial in the notorious Château d'If, and left to rot. Fourteen years later — after an extraordinary sequence of events involving a fellow prisoner, a hidden fortune, and a meticulously planned escape — Dantès returns to the world as the immensely wealthy Count of Monte Cristo, and begins to engineer the destruction of the men who ruined him.
What makes the novel more than just a revenge story is Dumas's willingness to follow the moral question all the way through. Dantès is not a straightforward hero. His revenge is precise, patient, and terrible. Innocent people are hurt. The novel eventually asks — and refuses to answer easily — whether Dantès has the right to do what he does, or whether the pursuit has made him into something no better than the men he set out to destroy. The book is long, but every scene is doing work.
The second is Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, published in 1883. Stevenson wrote it, originally, for his stepson, and its plot is the plot every reader now recognizes as the template for pirate fiction: a treasure map, a schooner voyage to a Caribbean island, mutiny, buried gold, and Long John Silver — the one-legged ship's cook whose complicated charisma made him one of the most memorable villains in English literature. Silver isn't simply evil; he's charming, competent, warm to the young narrator Jim Hawkins, and entirely willing to kill everyone who stands in the way of what he wants. Stevenson's genius was to make Silver more than a villain: he becomes the character Jim can neither trust nor stop admiring, and the moral center of a book that pretends to be an adventure yarn but is really a coming-of-age novel.
Between them, Dumas and Stevenson defined much of what the modern adventure novel would look like. We're continuing to expand this shelf toward the other great writers in the tradition: Jules Verne's globe-spanning journeys, Jack London's Yukon and South Seas fiction, H. Rider Haggard's African adventures, Rudyard Kipling's Indian stories, Joseph Conrad's darker maritime novels. Every book on this shelf is a verified public-domain text. Start reading.