Stevenson Under The Palm Trees by Alberto Manguel

Treasures from the last island

Robert Louis Stevenson was a man torn between the repressive forces of Scottish Calvinism, with which he had been imbued in his cradle, and the unfettered freedom of his desires. This duality, which underpins his most celebrated writing, has now been absorbed by Alberto Manguel into a fictional portrait of his life.

Stevenson Under the Palm Trees portrays the writer in his final days on the island of Samoa, where he has settled with his wife and family in an attempt to relieve his tubercular lungs. He is revered by the natives as a "tusitala" (teller of tales) and by Europeans as the resident celebrity. He himself feels that, at 44, his life has become commonplace, and his only passion is found in his work.

One evening in the shadows, he encounters a mysterious missionary who wears a hat very like his own and speaks in his native Edinburgh brogue. He hears the man's tones "mark the rhythm of his sentences" as he writes, while his presence drives the story into "darker and more violent territory". When his wife deems the manuscript unseemly, he throws it on to the fire (shades of the historical Stevenson burning the first draft of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after it met his wife's disapproval).

The Jekyll and Hyde connection, however, goes far deeper. A series of violent crimes, including rape, arson and murder, hit the island, in all of which Stevenson is implicated. It seems to him (and the reader) that a more likely candidate is the missionary, yet it is not even certain that the man exists. Might he be a figure Stevenson has conjured up, both to enact his fantasies and embody his resentment of the islanders, who live happily and healthily while he remains imprisoned in a diseased body and a Presbyterian past? Or might he be a "fetch": the disembodied image of a person supposed to presage his death?

Manguel mixes motifs from Stevenson's life and work into a delightful literary soufflé. While it is too easy, as several European critics have done, to heap excessive praise on a novella, this is a clever and charming jeu d'esprit.