Rating:

A Family Adventure Classic

Author: Johann David Wyss

The Swiss Family Robinson begins with shipwreck and ends with the establishment of a new kingdom – a reverse Lord of the Flies where a hapless family not only survives by wit and grit, but thrives on a delightful desert island. The Robinson’s are a large family, immigrating from their beloved Switzerland and caught mid-way by the peril of a storm. The sailors abandon the family, and the father, mother, and four boys ride out the storm on the stranded, sinking ship, only to arrive safely at a seemingly uninhabited island. From here, it’s all tricks of survival as the years tick by and the family explores their new domains, wars with aggressive animals, learns the seasons, and survives.

I first read this book as a middle-schooler. I remember being intensely apprehensive – terrified of the pure volume of the book and the old-school writing. “I will never be able to read this,” I remember telling my mother. I looked at the boring cover, the thick pages, the tiny print, and dreaded it. Yet, despite my struggles with the words (and yes, this is very old-school writing with enough adjectives and formalisms to keep a middle-schooler’s thesaurus and dictionary in constant check) I ended up falling in love with the story and with the act of reading. As a woman now in her mid-thirties who reads upwards of ten books at a time and explores every single genre over every time period, I’m here to say that Swiss Family Robinson opened up new worlds to me and encouraged me to explore the world of reading, much as the stranded boys explored their surprisingly diverse island home.

Now, that’s not to say that the story is 100% accurate. As a child, I just loved the imagery, the ideas, the endless inventions, and yes, the isolation of this family creating their own world. As an adult, I wonder where on earth (literarily where) an island with sugar cane, cotton, bananas, lions, elephants, tigers, jackals, giant pythons, pearl bearing oysters, giant salt caves, and penguins could possibly be. But, who cares, because the Robinsons have a cool cave home and a tree home, and some weird and wonderful animals are always slinking into view. Although…the python that bounces across the island on its coils is more creature of fantasy than real snake.

Artist unknown., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Of course, it’s not all fun and games. Despite the general good nature of the Robinsons, they do cut quite a swath across the island. It’s a bit like Montey Python’s shooting party. Neither man nor beast is safe. They kill everything. EVERYTHING. As a kid, I was too into the adventure to be super bothered. As an adult with a house bursting with animals, plus wild animals I feed, it bothers me. But . . .  the family did need to eat. Mind you, more animal sensitivity would be nice, especially as they make a baby monkey ride on the back of one of their dogs who had just killed and eaten its mother, something they find amusing. Shudders. I get survival, but come on Robinsons. Also, shouldn’t you leave something alive on the island? How much do you eat?

In the same magical vein, Father Robinson is ridiculously clever, and by the end of the book, he has successfully invented almost everything. I was waiting for him to create satellite TV, a mainframe, and a coffee maker out of banana leaves, because apparently his skills were unlimited. But, honestly, even though he never had a failure, it was still just fun and informative. As a middle-schooler, it helped me think about things in a more practical way – what is this thing made out of, how do inventions come to be, how can you break something down by the component parts. As an adult, I just liked the adventure and the perfection of the character’s hero skills. Way to go, my clever Robinsons.

In the end, this is a good family story, one that mostly has a positive, wholesome aura (sans the swathes of dead animals). The family expresses gratitude to God, practicality, curiosity, lovingness, independence, and bravery. Their mystical island, with all its animals and terrains, is a fun place to let the imagination roam, and the secret adventurer in us all can kick back and travel to another land and another place: to a beautiful, desert island. Highly recommended for children and adults.

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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