At the very beginning of this novella, Stevenson has gone out to watch the sunset, and finds a stranger among the mangroves. This man introduces himself as Mr Baker. To Stevenson’s delight, the stranger comes from Edinburgh. Baker is a missionary and staunch religionist who represents everything Stevenson rebelled against in his youth. Stevenson is too overjoyed to hear an Edinburgh accent to take against the man. Baker, however, is a man who is scathing about storytelling and fiction writing. For him, only one book counts - the bible.

Past and present intermingle in this novella. Stevenson himself remarks to Baker that the great distance between Samoa and his native city has made Edinburgh even more present to him now than when he lived there. Shortly after the meeting, Stevenson, his wife, Fanny, and their family (her two adult children and Stevenson’s widowed mother) attend a local Samoan feast. There Stevenson sees a young girl whose beauty entrances him, and he thinks on St Augustine who thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. Stevenson, faced with such beauty and temptation, says the same prayer of thanks. This will be a fateful moment.

A young local girl is later raped and murdered. The very girl Stevenson admired at the feast, though he only learns the victim’s identity later. His hat is found near the murder scene. The girl’s father initially does not suspect him, but as time goes on, and Baker causes mayhem among the locals, terrifying them with his religious fanaticism and contempt, suspicion begins to transfer to Stevenson. After the burning of a local saloon, which causes the deaths of a number of people, he is identified by locals as the culprit, even though he was somewhere else. A doppelganger is at large, and it’s no surprise to learn that the malevolent Baker is behind it all. But Stevenson’s health is failing, he is experiencing long periods of unconsciousness, and his dreams are plagued by a dark tale which seemed to predict the death of the girl and which he commits to paper, to Fanny’s horror. When she expresses her shock at the new story, Stevenson, enraged, burns the manuscript, in a scene that looks back to the birth of ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ where Fanny objected to the initial version which was then destroyed.

Baker and Stevenson engage in discussions about how to live, and about storytelling. As Stevenson notes, stories lie at the heart of the Samoan culture. “In this part of the world,” he says, “the stories you tell become part of reality.” And in ‘Stevenson Under The Palm Trees’ fiction and reality blur so that Stevenson’s dreams, fictions, and the local murder come together. The victim’s father initially wants Stevenson to investigate because he is a storyteller, and therefore better qualified than the chief justice to find out the truth.

As the novel progresses, it begins to resemble another novel which Stevenson would have known - James Hogg’s ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.’ In Hogg’s novel, the narrator, a staunch Calvinist bigot, believes he is one of the Elect, someone already destined to go to Heaven. Therefore, nothing he can do can change this status. Not even a serial murder spree, where he dispenses with a number of persons who cross his path, egged on by a mysterious character, Gil-Martin, who may be the devil, or an aspect of his own personality. As that novel progresses, it becomes clear that the narrator, Robert Wringham, is subject to long blackouts during which he has been seen with others, sometimes in sexually compromising situations, occasions he has no memory of. And this is where the link with Alberto Manguel’s novel occurs. Though it’s also true to say that Henry Jekyll is not consciously responsible for the acts of Hyde, Hogg’s novel does seem to haunt Manguel’s novel too, though it’s not clear whether Manguel is familiar with the earlier Scots metaphysical novel.

Argentine writer Borges was a great fan of Stevenson. One of his own collections is called ‘Fictions.’ Manguel’s novella could also be called fictions, because it is playing with fiction, stories, tales, and dreams. There’s a reference to Stevenson’s short story, ‘The Bottle Imp’ which the local Samoans believed to be a true tale. They thought Stevenson had such a bottle in his possession. Another Stevenson tale, the novella ‘The Beach of Falesa’ also has some links to Manguel’s novella, most notably in a white character who turns the local islanders against the narrator.

Baker tells Stevenson towards the end, “We are all characters in the same story, as you yourself said sometime, and our parts are interchangeable, even that of the story-teller.” But for Stevenson, the truth is more rooted in something else:

“Here, in the green heat, that which was forbidden was not mentioned. Evil was tabu, unuttered, it was not given existence in words. On the stones of Edinburgh was written, in the Gothic script that had so delighted Sir Walter Scott in his youth, the Old Testament warning, Thou Shalt Not, so that during Stevenson’s wanderings through the city his eye would always land, unbidden, on the outlawed temptations, the sins spelled out for all to know, offered as in a dark mirror even to those who had not yet conceived them, like an inverted pleasure.

Manguel’s novella is an exercise in beauty and simplicity, and yet it cleverly weaves together the strands of Stevenson’s past life in Scotland, his present life with Fanny, his love of the Samoan culture, his health problems, and his fictions. It offers too the dualities of Stevenson’s later existence: Samoan climate versus the cold, wet Edinburgh weather; the difference between the two cultures, in their flora and architecture, the clothes, the spiritual beliefs, and in their differing approaches to life. Easily read in an hour or so, the novella successfully engages the reader, and is well worth rereading. Though it may have particular interest for fans of Stevenson, gothic novels and metaphysical tales, its appeal is much broader. ‘Stevenson Under The Palm Trees’ comes with woodcuts by Stevenson, done when he was convalescing in Switzerland, before his move to Samoa.

Kara Kellar Bell is a film and media graduate from the West of Scotland, with a passion for European novels, French films, silent cinema, and Brazilian music (everything from Daniela Mercury and other pop stars through to bossa nova). As a writer, she likes to have room to move around creatively, so she’s not located in one genre. She writes realism and also stories of a more fantastic nature, usually grounded to some extent in the real world. She also takes delight in writing across the sexual spectrum, and as a bisexual, considers it important to remind people that things are not always black and white, either/or, in sexuality or in gender. For a selection of Kara’s writing on the Showcase section of this site, click here

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.