CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION BOOK REVIEW: “Erewhon Revisited” by Samuel Butler (1901)

I read Erewhon out of curiosity some years ago, as I have a soft spot for travelogues of nonexistent lands. They’re just fun, particularly the ones like Gulliver’s Travels and Utopia, that are social satire. I found mention of “Erewhon” (A lazy anagram for “Nowhere”) in the “Dictionary of Imaginary Places” and read it a few years back. I found it tedious and dull, for the most part, a particularly dry book written primarily to satirize the theory of evolution, which he disagreed with. It concerned one Nicholas Higgs who stumbles on a europeanesque civilization living in the mountains of New Zealand that have forsaken technology because their belief in Evolution suggests that eventually technology will become intelligent and take them over. This is a clever idea, and the earliest mention of such a think I can find (Written in 1871), but Butler intends this as a Swiftian satire of evolution, which he regards as ridiculous. In the end, Higgs escapes Erewhon by balloon. Bored by the book, I never got around to reading the sequel until now. Some people have classified “Erewhon” as a fantasy novel, but given that the entire thing revolves around a society that had steam engines 800 years ago, then decided to give them up because they were afraid of, essentially, a kind of Cylon Steampunk Uprising, it is *clearly* in the SF Genre. By extension, its sequel is also SF, though it doesn’t really concern itself with the technological fooferaw of the previous book.
“Erewhon Revisited” Takes place 20 years after “Erewhon” (But was published 30 years later), Higgs decides to head back to Erewhon. He sneaks in to find – to his shock – that a new religion has grown up around his ‘miraculous ascent into heaven’ and that he is the central object of veneration in this new cult called “Sunchildism.” The result of the book is a fairly on-target parody – and a blatantly sacreligious satire – on the origins of Christianity, as seen from the point of what I guess people derisively call “The Intellectual Elite“ rather than believers. The result is a book that is horribly, horribly offensive if you’re a believer, and horribly, horribly funny if you’re one of those heathens over at IO9 or Pink Raygun. In what I take to be a specific riff on the “Road to Emmaus” vision of Christ, Higgs bumps in to two apostolic priests (Named “Hanky” and “Panky”) who don’t recognize him at all, talk trash to him about the king, the church, and everything else, and assist him in poaching some game from the king’s lands). Hilarity ensues when the Apostle Hanky turns out to be the Erewhonian equivalent of the Apostle Paul, the premier agent in popularizing the new religion among the masses.
In Christianity, Paul is pretty much second only to Christ Himself in importance, the early hero of the faith. However there have been intermittent periods throughout the history of Christianity when theologians and people in general have suspected that Paul didn’t so much spread the teachings of Christ as he did make ‘em up as he went along to support his own whims in a manner not much different from a modern televangelist. This was a popular view amongst the post-enlightenment counterculture of the late Victorian era. Evidently, Mr. Butler supported this idea, and his Apostle Hanky is a fascinating, compelling, charismatic, devout, astute, intelligent person above reproach in public, but in private he’s a despicable, conniving con man interested only in furthering his own power, who claims to have known the Sunchild, but lies. When Hanky comes to realize Higgs is the Sunchild, he immediately recognizes him as a threat to his own power, and attempts to kill him repeatedly by hook or by crook. As some of my readers aren’t particularly religious and may not be able to follow this, I’ll put it in Christian Terms: It’s the equivalent of the Apostle Paul bumping in to Jesus one day while shopping and trying to kill Him.
Offensive as all this is (And believe you me, it’s intended to be), this level of cynicism in a late-Victorian novel is kind of charming, and if we close one eye and squint the other in order to take it as a criticism of the role of clergy as a self-perpetuating autocracy that will do anything, anything, anything to keep it’s grip on people, even if it means deliberately misrepresenting scripture, then it’s probably spot-on. I can cite dozens of examples of it happening in at least a half-dozen religions. That’s not to mention a couple preachers I’ve personally known who take after the literary Hanky rather than the real St. Peter.
There’s some less entertaining stuff in the novel – a drawing room farce, a bastard son Higgs never knew he had, and some needlessly OCD in the political maneuvering. Also, I feel that Higgs’ characterization kind of breaks down in the last couple chapters. In the first book, he’s an inarticulate lunkhead, a well-meaning guy who devoutly hopes to convert the Erewhonians to Christianity, and thereby win for himself a crown in heaven. In the latter part of the second novel, he’s more like Butler himself – a sort of semi-rational universalist who claims to have never taken Christianity terribly seriously. That’s a bit concerning, and the book suffers a bit as satire, and begins to loose the target there. The elements about evolution and Erewhonian Technophobia are completely dropped in “Revisited,” to no great effect.
For me, the big surprise was that the book was actually good! “Erewhon” itself starts out strong with a slice-of-life about a New Zealand Sheep Farmer, but then falls apart the moment it sets foot into fantasy. It took me weeks to plow through it on my first reading, and when I decided to re-read it before starting the sequel, it took me just as long. “Revisted” is vastly, vastly better, more entertaining, better paced. In the generation between the book and it’s sequel, the author evidently learned how to write.
“Revisited” ends with a tag for yet another sequel, which the author never lived to make; but which I’m somewhat tempted to write myself.