Runaway slave tells a better story than his friend Huckleberry Finn

In his new novel James, Percival Everett rights an omission from Mark Twain’s novel and gives is a much more satisfying ending

Percival Everett. Photo by Michael Tullberg/Getty Images

Carlo Gébler

Percival Everett’s new novel tells the story of Jim, the runaway slave in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn with whom Huck escapes down the Mississippi River. In James, much from Twain’s original remains, but much has been altered too.

For a start, Jim is no longer Jim — he’s James; and James, unlike Jim, is literate, having taught himself to read in Judge Thatcher’s library. His favourite writers are Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire. Everett also shifts the period. Huckleberry Finn is set in the 1830s or 1840s; Everett moves the story forward to the cusp of the US Civil War, which allows him to rewrite the end.