by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
A long sinister look at the father of Huck Finn and the dark side of antebellum life along the Mississippi, Finn is the debut work of Jon Clinch. If you’re familiar with Huckleberry Finn, you’ll find plenty of interesting narrative Easter Eggs, but you don’t have know the novel well in order to enjoy Finn. Cameos from the Widow Douglas and Judge Thatcher as well as a horrific re-imagining of the King, will have any fan of Twain enthralled.
Huck Finn’s drunken and negligent father, a peripheral figure in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, gets the full literary treatment. Though Pap Finn is a product of his own upbringing, it is not a stupidly sympathetic picture of a monster, but an unflinching look at the evil in our own humanity.
The novel opens with the Mississippi as the bearer of a body that will never have a proper funeral procession. Having just prefaced this first chapter with a quote from Huckleberry Finn about Jim and Huck’s discovery of Pap Finn’s body, the reader at first believes that we might be beginning with Pap’s body, unrecognizable as it is feasted upon by the creatures of the river. But we soon learn that this is the corpse is woman, meticulously stripped of all her skin and dropped into the river. The identity of the corpse, the murderer and the steps leading to the gruesome skinning are revealed in the course of Pap Finn’s life and death.
The narrative jumps throughout Finn’s life. Each freshly discovered detail of Finn’s life is not unlike the mural Finn himself traces in charcoal, depicting all that he becomes and all the evil that he both participates in and witnesses.
We learn that Finn is the son of a harsh figure known only as the Judge, who has a virulent hatred of any with skin darker than his own. Rebelling, Finn acquires a light-skinned runaway slave named Mary, upon which he imposes his own will. The Judge, who hates blacks so much that he does not even keep slaves for fear of tainting his family, casts Finn out.
Soon Mary is pregnant and gives birth to Huckleberry. Finn celebrates his son’s outer whiteness as he celebrates and laments all occasions—by drinking. Finn’s violence at a bar lands him in prison for a year after he crushes a man’s throat, not killing him, but rendering the man unable to speak.
Clinch wraps the timeline and events around Huckleberry Finn, at times taking scenes whole from Twain’s novel. His focus though, is on the hell-bound Pap Finn, so it doesn’t feel derivative at all. Rather, Clinch answers the mysteries and questions any reader might have had about the demise of Pap Finn. He uses the room that Huck and Jim find Pap’s corpse in as a jumping off point in his portrait of a monster. Clinch has plenty to say about how we relate to each other and how that relates to the idea of slavery.
Finn, for all his atrocities, for the murders he commits, for the careless violence he visits on those weaker than himself, wishes for redemption. He yearns for the revelations that Huck himself has on the river with Jim. But Pap Finn is as flawed and conflicted as the land around him. He’s doomed to never be more, and he knows it, drowning the knowledge in as much moonshine as he can pay for.
What little good there is in Finn is mirrored in Huck. Without Huck darting in and out of the narrative, as peripheral as Pap Finn was in his own tale, it is nearly impossible to see what could have been good in Finn. In Huck we see Finn’s love for freedom, realized more fully than it could ever be in the adult Finn, fettered as he is by his need for the Judge’s approval and the bottle.
Some might find that Clinch’s bold premise of Huck’s interracial parentage a contradiction of the message in Huckleberry Finn. I doubt Twain ever consciously suggested that Huck is of mixed parentage, but Clinch neatly solves the seeming contradiction, leaving Huck to follow his literary destiny as a free white boy who befriends a runaway slave.
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