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Erewhon (English Library) (Paperback)

by Samuel Butler (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
RRP: £9.99
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Frequently Bought Together

Erewhon (English Library) + News from Nowhere and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) + A Modern Utopia (Penguin Classics)
Price For All Three: £18.70

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Product details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Classics; New Impression edition (23 Feb 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0140430571
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140430578
  • Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.7 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 33,367 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #2 in  Books > Humour > Satire, Classic

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Product Description

Product Description

Setting out to make his fortune in a far-off country, a young traveller discovers the remote and beautiful land of Erewhon and is given a home among its extraordinarily handsome citizens. But their visitor soon discovers that this seemingly ideal community has its faults - here crime is treated indulgently as a malady to be cured, while illness, poverty and misfortune are cruelly punished, and all machines have been superstitiously destroyed after a bizarre prophecy. Can he survive in a world where morality is turned upside down? Inspired by Samuel Butler’s years in colonial New Zealand and by his reading of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Erewhon (1872) is a highly original, irreverent and humorous satire on conventional virtues, religious hypocrisy and the unthinking acceptance of beliefs.

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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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3.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Well, I very much enjoyed it myself, 19 May 2003
This review is from: Erewhon (Wordsworth Classics) (Paperback)
I have to disagree with Tony, I'm afraid. I thought Erewhon was very interesting and very amusing at times too. This was my first brush with Samuel Butler, so I did not really know what to expect, but despite the somewhat slow beginning (going into quite a bit of detail about how he reaches Erewhon), when he finally reached the lost civilisation, things really began to pick up.

The situation in which the narrator finds himself is at first curious, but quickly becomes outright bizarre. The values of the Erewhonians seem alien to us (sickness is punished by imprisonment, crime is merely frowned upon, beauty and manners are equated with morality) so that we are presented with a people who are both detestable and fascinating. At the same time, however, the Victorians who first read Butler's book would have come to realise the parallels between Erewhonian culture that of Victorian Britain, and it is the satire of the novel that is really interesting. The absurd institutions mentioned - the Musical Banks, the Colleges of Unreason, the Museum of the Machines - and the hypocritical nature of the Erewhonian religion, all would have reminded readers of their own world. For instance, at the Colleges of Unreason, the hypothetical language is taught, and the reader wonders why people would learn a language that has no use outside of the colleges. Then they realise that the same could be said for languages like Latin and ancient Greek. These are languages that are irrelevant to today, but are still studied in higher seats of learning.

In Erewhon, Butler created a satire of his own society that is both enlightening and entertaining. The characters are hardly very rounded and the story is not particularly filled out, but that hardly seems to matter. What Butler has to say is interesting, even now, and the way he says it is a delight to read. As E. M. Forster wrote concerning the author, "He wanted to write a serious book not too seriously". There were even times when his narrative had me giggling quitely to myself.

I would very much recommend this book.

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11 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars GREAT IDEAS MADE TEDIOUS, 18 Mar 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Erewhon (Wordsworth Classics) (Paperback)
This is a very stodgy and prolix 19th-century book, which none the less contains some excellent ideas of the social sci-fi variety. Looked at another way, it manages to bore you to death despite its shining originality. It was obviously written in a hurry (withholding the author's name) and was partly hacked together from Butler's essays; this is painfully evident in the later section, when you long for the interesting-but-sterile social analysis to end and the plot to move on. If only Butler had taken the time to weave his wonderful concepts more expertly into the fabric of the story, this could have been one of the classics of social science fiction. But it's still better than The Difference Engine.
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