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It might have lost out at the Booker, but James, a reworking of Huckleberry Finn by Percival Everett, was the unofficial book of 2024, topping best-of-the-year lists and winning the prestigious US Book Award for fiction. Everett retells Mark Twain’s 1884 picaresque novel about a 13-year-old boy’s escapades on the Mississippi from the perspective of runaway slave Jim. Shocking, gripping and surprisingly comic, it’s a bravura performance that celebrates and subverts the original.
Its success follows that of last year’s Women’s prize-winning Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, a dazzling 550-page updating of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield transported to the author’s home region of Appalachia during the 1990s opioid epidemic. As the supreme chronicler of social injustice, Dickens provided Kingsolver with “a masterclass” in how to use narrative to make readers care about a latter-day underclass.
This trend for repurposing canonical works continues into next year. Call Me Ishmaelle by the Chinese-British writer Xiaolu Guo transforms the American behemoth Moby-Dick into a feminist adventure starring a cross-dressing female sailor. Guo describes her novel as “a homage to an American master, but with transgressive twists”. All three of these masters were white men. Dealing with issues of race, social injustice, gender and our relationship with nature, each of these reimaginings of 19th-century novels gives a new slant on the contemporary American crisis.
As well as being one of the most significant novels in American literature – “the best book we’ve had”, according to Hemingway – Huckleberry Finn has also been one of the most controversial and most banned. A new edition with racist terms removed was published in 2011. The New York Times complained that “there is no way to ‘clean up’ Twain without doing irreparable harm to the truth of his work”. Recent edited versions of novels by Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming have met with similar accusations of censorship.
Rewriting, rather than simply removing offensive language or storylines, confronts problematic texts. By changing the perspective of a novel, marginalised figures can be turned into the heroes of their own lives, to paraphrase the opening line of David Copperfield. Everett rescues James from the racial stereotypes of Twain’s original, giving him back his proper name, depth of character and literacy. “With my pencil I wrote myself into being,” James says.
From Jean Rhys’s landmark postcolonial and feminist prequel to Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, in 1966 to Sandra Newman’s Julia, a powerful retelling of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four published last year, overlooked female characters are also being written into existence. Unsurprisingly, ancient myths have proved fertile territory for female-led reboots, with Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker and Madeleine Miller all going behind the battle lines of the Odyssey and the Iliad.
None of this is new. Shakespeare drew heavily on classical stories (Romeo and Juliet is based on Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe). In turn, there are no end of Shakespeare-inspired offshoots. All storytelling is retelling. Returning to old books is not a failure of invention, but a way of keeping the canon alive. Whether the contemporary authors stick faithfully to the plot line (as Kingsolver does) or play fast and loose with the original (like Everett), they breathe fresh life into much-loved characters and stories. At their best, reworkings like James and Demon Copperhead are future classics in their own right.
