|
On the topic of racism, I was impressed by one saying of Ignosi: when sir Henry wants him to promise to rule fairly and not kill people without trial, Ignosi hesitates before consenting and says the ways of black men are different from the ways of white men, and they do not value life so dearly (I did not bookmark the page so I cannot reproduce the sentence exactly).
I thought it was an interesting remark on the differences between cultures, possibly implying that western civilisation is not "right" about everything.
Another thing that was to be expected in a book from that period is gender issues. I found the dedication of the book quite interesting: [...] to all the big and little boys who read it. The discussion at the beginning about women at the beginning was also interesting, because the narrator discusses what "counts" as a woman or not in order to say if there are women or not in the story, and the witch gagool is deemed too old to be counted as a woman.
Mind you, I'm not taking that against the author, those consideration were to be expected at the time.
Overall I found the book enjoyable but did not like it very much. I understand how it was inspirational to a lot of other stories (Indiana Jones was in my mind while I was reading), but all these subsequent stories in my opinion kind of robbed this book of what it had to bring, and to me it felt like déjà-vu.
|