This rewriting of Mark Twain is sly, shocking and sensationally good

Percival Everett reveals a lot about his reworking of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) with his stark choice of title: James. Twain’s scrappy child protagonist has been usurped, in terms of story­telling responsibilities, by the character most talked about and criticised by teachers, parents’ groups and censors, through waves of controversies, bannings and retellings. And one of the first things that character wants us to know? His name isn’t Jim: it’s James.

Nor is this an “adventure” in the naïve and thrilling way of a children’s book. It’s the story of an enslaved man struggling to liberate his wife and daughter, his self, and the people he picks up along the way. We’re in the 19th-century American South, where James, owned by Huck’s aunt, Miss Watson, hears that he’s to be sold and separated from his family; he runs off to a nearby unoccupied island in the Mississippi. There, his story ­collides with Huck’s: the latter has faked his own murder to escape from his abusive, alcoholic father. James knows that the coincidence of his disappearance and Huck’s “death” is likely to make the search for him frenzied. He’s no longer just a runaway: he’s now a suspect in the murder of a white child.

Everett’s story follows the flow of Twain’s Adventures, albeit without the convenient happy ending. It also insists that James exists outside of Huck’s understanding of him. For starters, James has been hiding his ability to read and write, unsure what his owners might do if they knew. When he finds some paper and a pencil, it plants the idea that he could write out his own story – a notion of authorial control that Everett has already introduced to the reader by renaming his protagonist James instead of “Jim”. Not that such control, however, will grant James complete power over his destiny: he’s still bought and sold several times in different contexts, some amusing and others ­terrifying, and he spends most of his time reacting to others, running away from danger or trying to survive an attack. But he’s aware that controlling the narrative gives him power, whether or not he yet knows how to define or use it.

The history of the slave narrative is rife with imposters and frauds. What 19th-century white American readers seemed to want – both supporters and abolitionists – was the experience of slaves distorted through a white person’s perspective. Fake memoirs proliferated. Take Mattie Griffith, for example, an abolitionist who, in 1856, published Autobiography of a Female Slave. She had inherited and emancipated slaves from her Kentucky family, but then she published a pseudo-memoir by “Ann”, an ­educated mixed-race servant who was abused, until eventually being freed, by her owner. For all ­Griffith’s heartfelt desire to shine a light on the horrors of slavery, she – like many such writers – protected the delicate sensibilities of her ­genteel white audience, and focused on the slaves’ lack of personal freedom, while leaving out any depiction of sexual assault, forced breeding or other common tortures. The realities of slavery were thought too gruesome to discuss in polite society, even for those who supported abolition. (Some American schoolbooks today keep those realities secret; in Florida, students are taught that black slaves learnt valuable skills.)

Everett gives a shrewd dramatic presentation of the split consciousness of enslaved people. James is careful to speak in “slave talk” around his white peers, the language Twain used for Jim’s original dialogue. He teaches this language to his daughter Lizzie in an early scene, as a survival strategy for when she has to pretend the cornbread given to their family by their owner was good instead of inedible. Lizzie comes up with: “Dat be sum of conebread lak neva I et.” James agrees: “That would be the correct incorrect grammar.” In private, away from what white people want to hear, their language shifts, as it historically did, in what today would be called “code switching”.

The good intentions of abolitionists and the unconvinced are shown slantwise by Everett. At one point, James is bought by a minstrel show and asked to sing in blackface – “a light-brown black man painted black in such a way as to appear like a white man trying to pass for black”. The minstrel show is run by a fictional version of the real-life entertainer Daniel Decatur Emmett, the composer of such songs as Dixie and The Blue Tail Fly; he claims a sympathy with slaves and refuses to own one outright. Yet while his songs claim to vocalise the slave experience – however romanticised and infantilised for the audience – the moment James betrays him, he turns into any other violent and outraged white man.

And James, through it all, is still James, no matter what confounding situation he finds himself in. As he and Huck travel down the Missi­s­sippi on a raft, they encounter many a conman and ne’er-do-well, and are pulled into all manner of scenes. In each new town and setting, James is renamed and mis­understood and mistaken for someone else. But his language and consciousness change as circ­umstances do, and beyond the ­language for white people and for fellow slaves, there’s a third shift: into the language of posterity. James struggles to decide how to tell his story, but he knows it’s key that he does. He has been denied authority and authorship over his own existence, and is fighting to establish it. It’s thrilling, across Everett’s novel, to see him understand this about himself.

Everett is playfully unfaithful and disloyal to Twain’s original text in a way that places James far from the contemporary trend of retelling classic works from the perspective of an alternative protagonist. (Last year alone, for example, we saw two novel-length reimaginings of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.) That trend is more a nostalgic retreat into fantasies of helplessness as a way of avoiding the complications and compromises of the present. Too many works, for instance, merely retell Shakespeare, Greek myths or other classics with a new, non-white, non-male or non-straight protagonist, whose context is romanticised and who’s blessed with a modern sensibility. They can seem brave and bold in the face of oppression simply by acting as stand-ins for their 21st-century audience.

James, by contrast, is more in line with Everett’s own novel ­Erasure, which played with the gap between what a writer wants to communicate and what the audience and institutions that mediate that relationship want to hear. There’s a whole PhD thesis to be written on how Everett’s adap­tation of Twain’s Adventures compares to American Fiction, the Hollywood adaptation of Erasure, which made choices that, to my mind, rendered the story more palatable for a white audience. (One character’s death, for instance, was changed from being caused by pro-life violence to a heart attack.)

Much as in Twain’s original work, Everett mixes the sweet with the bitter and horror with hilarity. Death stalks the Mississippi, and its waters are the source of food, tragedy and freedom, in both reality and fantasy. But Everett’s approach to violence is less oblique than Twain’s, as he dives through politeness and soc­iety’s pretences; Twain’s allusions to the brutality of white slave owners become graphic representations of whippings and other pun­ish­ments. James insists upon its position as both interlocutor and subject, and the result is a challenge to both readers and the canon. Everett has long been the overlooked genius of American letters, writing work that’s too tough, too smart and too exact for widespread admiration. But now, by wrestling so well with one of the literary angels, he demands to be recognised.

James is published by Mantle at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books. Percival Everett will be in conversation with Ben Lawrence at the Oxford Literary Festival on April 13. Info: oxfordliterary festival.org