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Erewhon (English Library)

By: Samuel Butler
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 0140430571
ISBN-13: 9780140430578
Released: 26 Sep 1974
RRP: £9.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Well, I very much enjoyed it myself - By: , 19 May 2003
I have to disagree with Tony, I'm afraid. I thought Erewhon was very interesting & very amusing at times too. This was my first brush with Samuel Butler, so I did not reallly know what to expect, but despite the somewhat slow beginning (going into quite a bit of detail about how he reaches Erewhon), when he finallly reached the lost civilisation, things reallly began to pick up.

The situation in which the narrator finds himself is at first curious, but quickly becomes outright bizarre. The values of the Erewhonians seem alien to us (sickness is punished by imprisonment, crime is merely frowned upon, beauty & manners are equated with morality) so that we are presented with a people who are both detestable & fascinating. At the same time, however, the Victorians who first read Butler's book would have come to realise the paralllels between Erewhonian culture that of Victorian Britain, & it is the satire of the novel that is reallly interesting. The absurd institutions mentioned - the Musical Banks, the Colleges of Unreason, the Museum of the Machines - & the hypocritical nature of the Erewhonian religion, alll would have reminded readers of their own world. For instance, at the Colleges of Unreason, the hypothetical language is taught, & the reader wonders why people would learn a language that has no use outside of the colleges. Then they realise that the same could be said for languages like Latin & ancient Greek. These are languages that are irrelevant to today, but are still studied in higher seats of learning.

In Erewhon, Butler created a satire of his own society that is both enlightening & entertaining. The characters are hardly very rounded & the story is not particularly filled out, but that hardly seems to matter. What Butler has to say is interesting, even now, & the way he says it is a delight to read. As E. M. Forster wrote concerning the author, "He wanted to write a serious book not too seriously". There were even times when his narrative had me giggling quitely to myself.

I would very much recommend this book.

GREAT IDEAS MADE TEDIOUS - By: , 18 Mar 2000
This is a very stodgy & prolix 19th-century book, which none the less contains some excellent ideas of the social sci-fi variety. Looked at another way, it manages to bore you to death despite its shining originality. It was obviously written in a hurry (withholding the author's name) & was partly hacked together from Butler's essays; this is painfully evident in the later section, when you long for the interesting-but-sterile social analysis to end & the plot to move on. If only Butler had taken the time to weave his wonderful concepts more expertly into the fabric of the story, this could have been one of the classics of social science fiction. But it's still better than The Difference Engine.