{"id":4693,"date":"2022-10-11T08:57:37","date_gmt":"2022-10-11T08:57:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/?page_id=4693"},"modified":"2022-10-11T09:41:35","modified_gmt":"2022-10-11T09:41:35","slug":"silver-by-andrew-motion","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/writing\/book-reviews\/silver-by-andrew-motion\/","title":{"rendered":"Silver, by Andrew Motion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Silver<\/em>, by Andrew Motion<\/strong><\/p>\n

I finally got round to reading the swine that sabotaged my own Further Adventures of Jim Hawkins<\/a>. Much more slow-burning and introspective \u2013 you can tell it was written by a poet. I\u2019m pretty sure Jim never got into meditations on the psychological states of the sea in the original. It does mean that when we encounter the baddies, though, they are well and truly unquestionably evil, degenerate in every moral, spiritual and physical sense. (They are the three sailors marooned on the island at the end of the original, who have now built up their own little empire with the survivors of a slave ship that ran aground a few years ago.) But for precisely that reason there is nothing complex about them. They will never do anything to surprise anyone. In fact all the characters are under such tight authorial control that you know none of them will ever wander off and do something really stupid that buggers up the plot and has to be sorted out, which is what makes a book interesting. When they do do something stupid, it\u2019s for no other reason than they felt like it, which really doesn\u2019t convince.<\/p>\n

My biggest gripe remains that it\u2019s yet another return to Treasure Island \u2013 something Jim vowed he would never do. Fair enough, it\u2019s Jim\u2019s son doing the returning, but the fact is there\u2019s enough potential in Jim\u2019s story for all sorts of other adventures that don\u2019t feature the island.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Silver, by Andrew Motion I finally got round to reading the swine that sabotaged my own Further Adventures of Jim Hawkins. Much more slow-burning and introspective \u2013 you can tell it was written by a poet. I\u2019m pretty sure Jim … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":368,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4693","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4693"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4731,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4693\/revisions\/4731"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}