5 Books I definitely do not love (part 2)

2. Robinson Crusoe I have just finished reading this, as a continued effort to read the 'classics', and as I thought I had a vague idea of the storyline I figured it would be an entertaining read. I was wrong. Not only was the story I had in my head vastly different from the plot of the novel but it was better. I enjoyed the opening couple of chapters as they were basically the story of how many people warned the protagonist that going to sea was a terrible idea and that nothing good would come of it if he pursued a life on the briny, however it soon became clear that this was about as good as it was going to get. The shipwreck itself was quite exciting, but the detailed descriptions of the things he salvaged from the ship, the manner in which he constructed his shelter and all kinds of other, more boring things left me cold. But all that seemed positively thrilling compared to the pontificating and philosophising Crusoe did about God. Now, I am not religious, but I appreciate that there are many situations in which recourse to religion is comforting, but there is something infuriating about the way Crusoe embraces religion emphatically when he is on his own, but manages to maintain an air of colonial blood lust as soon as he sees another person on the island. Obviously the context of the novel is important - the morals of 1719 don't necessarily translate to the modern day, but so much of the novel revolves around Crusoe's paranoia at being attacked by cannibals and his increasing devotion to God that I kept wondering whether I was re-reading sections which I had already battled through. Obviously there isn't much action to report over nearly 30 years of solitary living on an island, but I was always under the impression that more happened somehow. Take this very brief summary from Wikipedia: 'The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Venezuela, encountering Native Americans, captives, and mutineers before being rescued.' The problem, as far as I am concerned, is that all that stuff happens in the final quarter of the book - we all know about Man Friday, but what I didn't realise was that he didn't appear until the 25th year of his stay on the island, and the mutineers really only appear in the last couple of chapters. I suppose it is mostly a question of unrealistic expectations - I had expected Robinson Crusoe to contain more action and less detailed husbandry, which was my mistake, but in my defence I suspect that my expectations were artificially raised by the fact that I really enjoyed Gulliver's Travels. As far as I'm concerned that could have been published this year - the insight into the nature of humanity, the wry way of attributing characteristics to entire communities as a kind of thought experiment which seems to reach the conclusion that no matter how you try to run your life, a community, a country or a planet, essentially people cannot and will not agree, and even if they do, something else will arise to create confusion and ultimately unhappiness. A flying island where over emphasis on music and maths renders the inhabitants impotent to achieve anything, a race of super intelligent horses who revile humans, wars fought over which end to start eating a boiled egg. The relevance of Swift's observations is as fitting today as it must have been then, and I think that the gap between the way Gulliver's Travels made me think about the world and the way that Robinson Crusoe just made me want to finish the book so I could start something else is probably just a symptom of my inability to appreciate that the novel in its earliest form. I can only suspend disbelief for so long without needing something to get my teeth into, and Robinson Crusoe didn't give me enough.