Book Review: The Wrong Box, by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
Robert Louis Stevenson is a household name, whose works include Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He only lived from 1850 to 1894 and this little number was published in 1889, so represents one of his final achievements delivered at the height of his powers. There’s a co-writer, Lloyd Osbourne, but he must have been reasonably good too because I can’t tell which passages are Stevenson’s and which are not. The story feels as if it was written by one mind, holding it in the hollow of a single hand with no hint of committee input.
RLS is generally thought of as an author of dramatic adventures, but this is a departure because it’s a macabre comedy, a farce if you like. He must have been a serious man with a sarcastic sense of humour that was dying to tunnel its way out of the starched shirt. Excuse the quotation from memory, as the book is no longer to hand, but some of the lines are just as applicable today, things like “Julia often made acquaintances in Bournemouth… and would have greatly preferred more allowance and less uncle.” There’s also “an incident at the railway ticket office which bordered on brigandage”, which sounds familiar and still topical to me. Then, after a supposed murder, failure to declare the death followed by desecration of the corpse and forgery of its signature, “the legal profession can be so petty”. There’s also a massive double train wreck, metal and mutilation, where one of the shell-shocked survivors declares “I think there may have been some sort of accident.”
Despite dozens of excellent moments, I marked it down from a four to a three star rating not because I didn’t think it was great stuff but because the language can be stilted, there are slow sections that could have been cut down to keep the action rolling, then it goes a bit wrong near the end and reads like a rush for the finish post. That aside, the core idea is terrific so I’m not underselling this.
The tontine idea this is based on is such a wonderfully, exquisitely pointless venture that even though it originated in Italy, I can easily imagine the Victorian English seizing on it and making it their own. It’s brilliant of course, brilliant, but pointless. I think I need that in my life. In brief, imagine the parents of thirty children putting in a block of money for investment. The last surviving child after ninety or so years wins all of the capital and the interest, which has accumulated over the course of their long lifetime. Naturally, they will be as good as dead when they get it and too much of an invalid to enjoy spending anything, so the whole scheme becomes ridiculous, just a way to put wealth out of circulation for up to a century. It’s a good excuse for the author to show the size of the group depleting in different entertaining ways, but this wasn’t explored as well as it might have been.
I can see themes in this book that have been re-used in popular culture, such as the body in the piano turning up again fifty years later in The Green Man (Alistair Sim) and I’d say it had some influence on Death of a Salesman and permeated into the roots of detective theatre.
The people for whom a tontine contract is not ridiculous are the children/nephews/nieces of the last two survivors as it’s the grandchildren of the original funders who are the true beneficiaries, not the original children at all, there’s the rub, and they have every incentive to prod the oldies to a premature demise.
The Wrong Box is black humour, it’s vicious, insulting, full of greed, cruel and utterly immoral, just like money itself. There can only be one winner in this story — and that’s the reader. I hope you like it as much as I did.
