This book should be portrayed next to the word sprawling in the dictionary. Published in 1892 it is, in Stevenson's words, a "South Seas yarn" but there is so much more to it. In the first section, our narrator, the Young Hero, is just starting out in the world and intent on becoming an artist and studying in Paris. His loving father would prefer that he entered into business and they go back and forth, the young man pursuing his dream and the father using his purse strings to indulge young man enough that he can try his hand at art, but giving him a boundary on how long his father will continue support.
While studying in Paris he forms a fateful friendship with an Idea Man: a high-energy, hype-man fellow who flits from idea to idea, scheme to scheme; not without success. In time the Idea Man moves to San Francisco after losing interest in art. The Young Hero soldiers on in Paris, his dream of being an artist suffering setbacks, until he gets the news that his father has made some bad investments and gone bankrupt. No more money will be coming. After struggling a bit more in Paris, he gets further communication that his father has died.
The Young Hero leaves Paris, gathers up what he can of his father's estate and heads to San Francisco to meet up with his old friend, the Idea Man, who has promised him work. The Idea Man comes through and they run a successful boat touring business for a while before the story shifts gears again.
Note that we are nearly half way through the book at this point, and we have not yet started the main plot or been to the South Seas. Now, that is not to say the story is slow moving or this all doesn't work to set up the characters going forward. It does, quite beautifully. There is no shortage of interesting developments along the way. In fact, it wonderfully sets up how the Young Hero and the Idea Man, by the nature of their characters, get involved in a shady and outright illegal scheme next. The Idea Man is shown to have connections to what I think we would call a mob boss in San Francisco in the interest of his enthusiasm for successful business ventures. The Young Hero is shown to be almost unaffected by his father's death other than in the way it upsets his life, suggesting his moral center is nebulous.
Also, the amount of time spent on florid descriptions of scenes and settings is about half the length of the book. It's all marvelously written with sentences intricately constructed in a manner that is lost to us now. I suppose that in 1892, when you took to reading a book, you had patience. Not only was there a lack of visual distraction. You had to depend on the words to describe things you have never seen. I can bring up any number of pictures and videos of San Francisco and its environs, and in fact it's not an enormous matter for me to actually go there to see what it's like (which I have). In 1892, readers would have only had the description in the book to go by, so extended descriptions of settings and people were necessary and appreciated. My lesson: reading old books gives you insight into what reading books was like for people centuries past.
Which leads to my next observation. With the overwhelming majority of books I have read, I have had the reaction that it could have been shortened by a third. (P.G. Wodehouse being an exception.) A century and a half ago, I probably would have felt the need for more. There is a think piece to be written about how the visual arts can stunt our appreciation for beautiful prose. I am not going to be writing it, but there you are.
In any event, you can think of The Wrecker as almost 4 books in one. The first being the Young Hero in Paris. The second being the adventures of the Young Hero and the Idea Man in San Francisco.
The third is where the South Seas adventure begins. The Young Hero and Idea Man decide to try Wrecking. A shipwrecked vessel was (is?) auctioned to the highest bidder to parties who speculate that the cost of purchase is lower than the value of what they can salvage from the ship. Our protagonists enter an auction confident in the value of the bid, but when they get in a bidding war with someone bidding by proxy the auction price explodes by an order of magnitude. They are swept up in bidding and go deep into debt to win the auction. They jointly come to the conclusion that if someone was willing to go so high on the bid, there must be something very valuable on board. They presume: Opium.
With their last pennies they arrange for a crew and ship to reach the wreck, on Midway island, the Young Hero to join the voyage while the Idea Man hangs back in San Francisco to hold off the bankers as long as he can.
The wreck salvage doesn't pan out as hoped. They do find some opium, but not enough to save them from bankruptcy. The Young Hero talks himself into betraying his partner and keeping the little opium money for himself, rationalizing that he would be making his partner party to criminal activity for a small amount of money that wouldn't save him anyway.
Perhaps more interestingly, papers and photos found in the wreckage suggest something else was going on; that the crew of this wreck were not who they say they were; that something more wicked that opium smuggling was happening.
In the fourth section the Young Hero is pursuing the mystery in competition with the Shyster, who was the agent making bids for the wreck with the other party and who has also reasoned out that something strange was going on. After some machinations they travel to England and finally approach the family of the man who was counter-bidding for the wreck and discover they have no knowledge of him, that he was disowned long ago. The Shyster vanishes. The Young Hero takes the opportunity to revisit Paris and, through connections, finds the other bidder.
The other bidder relates a harrowing story of how he was made a Remittance Man by his family and recounts a tale of how he became involved with the wrecked ship and effective on the run. I won't give the details away. Our Young Hero, again demonstrating his moral flexibility, initially thought to gain from blackmailing the Remittance Man, but in the end, they become friends and fellows or a sort.
While clearly a character driven story, the character arcs are not obvious. I would guess most of the characters start and end in the same place. But then, Robert Louis Stevenson considered himself an entertainer above all else. And this is indeed monumental yarn.
Should you read The Wrecker? You need patience, as discussed. And you need to be able to deal with the complex sentences and vocabulary that people used to employ long ago (in contrast, it is near enough in history for you to recognize the personality types). If you have those things, it is quite entertaining and thought provoking.
Aside: In reading about him, I stumbled on this Roberet Louis Stevenson quote:
The man is a success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.
Yes.
