Forget Robinson Crusoe, this witty new retelling is undeniably brilliant

Cast Away, Francesca de Tores’ second historical novel, tells the story of Alexander Selkirk, the putative inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s 1719 classic Robinson Crusoe. A stock-standard retread might easily have run aground upon the Scylla and Charybdis of kitsch and tedium. It is to de Tores’ credit not only that she avoids these, but that the result is such agile, witty, sophisticated entertainment.

Stranded on an island in the South Pacific, Selkirk warns readers at the outset he is “not inclined to listening”. (His preferred hobbies are “brawling, drinking and leaving”.) In a nice bit of irony, the Scottish trading company he initially joins as a sailor offers “a life entirely new”. After provoking the captain of one voyage, that is precisely what Selkirk gets: left to fend for himself 400 miles from the coast of Chile, ships grace the shoreline. Unfortunately, many of them are Spanish, and, given the odds of being taken as a slave, a Spanish ship is as good as no ship.

In the absence of much else to do, Selkirk elaborates on his origins: the youngest of seven sons, incessantly bullied by his brothers (“my dearest wish is to either kill them or become them”), he endures a fraught relationship with his parents. (Of his mother, he remarks: “It is not always easy to despise her, but having made up my mind, I am nothing if not stubborn”.) Taunted and ashamed, he develops a relationship with a young woman, Effie Breck, permitting de Tores scenes of comic flirtation worthy of James or Austen.

No man is an island, but having gained one, Selkirk finally has time to complete his desert island read – a copy of the Bible he blacks out with charcoal, creating an erasure poem vividly reproduced throughout the novel. Yet Selkirk yearns for something a little more saucy; breast references in the Song of Solomon only get you so far, no matter how much begetting takes place elsewhere.

With no means of oblivion via sex or drugs available, Selkirk becomes his own best friend, biggest enemy and most intimate lover. He finds a cat, Pickle, and feeds her with more enthusiasm than he cares to feed himself. He also befriends a more mischievous feline, Sleek, and a theologically minded goat – the “Reverend Vicarious Cronch”. Between dedicated bouts of masturbation, Selkirk looks enviously upon his pets: “Even Pickle has by now whelped three litters, and in a range of colours that reflects poorly on her virtue”.

Freed from the abiding presence of his past – that audience who might otherwise condemn or praise, judge or scorn him – Selkirk invests Sleek and the Reverend with powers of speech, judgement, and amity. By treating the speaking animals so credulously, de Tores’ narrative device proves both humorous and affecting: Selkirk needs the conversation; Sleek, his regular feeding of goat livers.

Eventually, we learn Selkirk has wronged his lover Effie terribly. Here, de Tores has some fun with the “kirk” pun, a Scottish term connoting the church and its judgement. Fuelled by a sense of shame and the (imagined) public gaze, Selkirk wonders if he hasn’t died at sea and awoken in a watery hell, consigned to deal alone with his shames, guilts, regrets and recriminations. He starts to miss his brothers. He strikes up conversation with a goat skull. Who wouldn’t?

De Tores interrogates Selkirk’s character by having him confront a simple question: how does one inclined not to listen learn to do so? “[S]uffering is not a currency with which you can purchase absolution”, Sleek counsels. Seeking an accounting anyway, his animal brethren point out that anything truly unforgivable requires being unable to ask for forgiveness.

Existential questions nag at him: is he blessed to survive, or damned to? Is he better or worse off than some of the shipmates he once knew, sunk thousands of feet below the water’s surface, ignorant of hunger or worry or hope? By having Selkirk importune an imagined audience, de Tores does not suggest that Selkirk loses his sense of loneliness so much as he “forget[s] to be lonely” – a psychologically confronting state for a man so used to ignoring his circumstances. Having already changed from ne’er-do-well to accomplished navigator, forced to meet the island on its own terms, Selkirk is reasonably sanguine about being cast away: what scares him more is the thought of being “lost to all knowing”, a dying “more complete than any other.”

De Tores convincingly recreates the language and interiority of the period, though she does allow for a few contemporary flourishes (“I swim and I swim until the only thought I have room for is breathe, breathe, breathe”). Expertly combining pathos, elegance, and paciness, drawing the reader in with gallows humour, by the time the trap door of de Torres’ novel swings open its brilliance seems undeniable. As Selkirk reflects, “I am furious when I eat, and desolate even when I frig myself, and in every way I know for certain that this island has ruined me. And yet I live”.

Cast Away by Francesca de Tores is published by Bloomsbury ($33).