Stealing the story of Robinson Crusoe from Daniel Defoe, Tournier creates a highly readable essay on the nature of the human beast and its consciousness. While Tournier’s Crusoe is marooned on the desert isle with the usual bits and pieces — pipe tobacco, gunpowder and a copy of the Bible — he also takes with him a large and complex late-twentieth century psyche and a good handful of philosophical approaches to examine it with while in his solitude.


Amongst others there is a Jungian-type retreat into the heart of the primal darkness of matter, in the days before it found a voice, a Freudian episode of return to the lulling nest of the womb as well as the same good old Protestant battle against sloth and for ‘industry’ (in the sense of hard work) found in Defoe’s original.


Tournier, who at his best has great storytelling powers, has grasped the essential point of the prototype book; the island is a marvellous and a marvellously cruel lab in which to study the human being. Under the great arc lamps of his absolute solitude Robinson’s lonely consciousness is forced first into trying to abandon his humanity, wallowing in filth and forgetting and trying to turn himself into an insensate animal. But recovering his identity he builds various kinds of relationship with the island itself and eventually plays out all the ways that we as a race have found of knowing and co-existing with our world. In this we have a valuable fable for an ecologically confronted age.


Alongside this general reflection via fable on the human condition and humanity-in-nature is an equally interesting examination of mid-life crisis. For Robinson marooned in the Pacific read Joe Blow marooned in the seemingly inescapable structures of daily life. Tournier wrote this book in his early forties and the solutions he finds for his hero’s life may well have a resonance and the ring of true coin to other reflective men and women of that age-group.

‘He...cut himself a quill from a vulture’s feather, and nearly wept with delight when he traced his first words on paper. In thus performing the noble act of writing it seemed to him that he half-retrieved himself from the abyss of animalism into which he had sunk, and made a return to the world of the spirit. Thenceforward he resorted nearly every day to his journal, not to set down the greater or lesser events of the day, to which he attached little importance, but to record his thoughts, his spiritual progress, his recollections of the past and the reflections to which these gave rise.

A new life thus began for him — or more exactly, it was the beginning of his true life on the island, after that period of degradation which he now thought of with shame and sought to forget.’ p41