If I'm not mistaken, Tobias George Smollett is not one of the best-known authors of his age, which is a shame, because man was he good.
Here's his first novel, published in his late 20s. Like many first novels, it takes its cue largely from the author's own life. In form, it's much like what literati call a bildungsroman, a German words for a novel telling about a young man's early life and education, so you won't be surprised to learn that “Roderick Random” is rather episodic instead of a smooth progression from beginning to end. Many bildungsromans are like that; at least this one has a protagonist with a last name that hints at that sort of fragmentary nature.
Like Smollett, Roderick Random is born in Scotland. He has the misfortune to be the child of a rich man's son and a woman that the rich man didn't want him to marry. Roderick's mother soon dies and his grandfather disowns Roderick's father, so the child has to suffer through his early years He nevertheless gets a pretty good education and receives training as a ship's surgeon, also like Smollett. And so he goes off on his adventures.
Here's where the episodes begin. Roderick lives as a ship's surgeon, a servant, a gentleman of leisure (which leads him to gamble away his money), an apothecary, and any one of a number of other professions. While all of this goes on, of course, he has to contend with all kinds of different people – friends, enemies, employers both good and bad, and lovers of one kind or another. His adventures get more outlandish over time, until he finds himself in Africa and in South America. Then he encounters the standard happy ending, which thankfully takes up only a very few pages, and the story ends.
Today's creative writing programs teach that a novel's protagonist has the change his or her nature over time – Luke Skywalker starts off wanting to be an Imperial pilot and ends by becoming an apprentice Jedi; Elizabeth Bennett begins as a sarcastic youngster and ends by being a committed, loving wife. Roderick doesn't change his world view much, although he does mature somewhat. Other than that, he remains a competent, intelligent, rather hotheaded young man. He even stays in love with the woman he first falls in love with throughout. By the standards of today's creative writing programs, “Roderick Random” is an interesting failure. By the standards of, I suspect, most of today's readers, it's pretty great.
The shortcomings of “Roderick Random”, such as they are, are those of a first novel. It's a little too reliant on the incidents of Smollett's life, though not too much so, and its influences (such as “Don Quixote) are a little more obvious than quite necessary. There's nothing particularly innovative about the novel. Other books of the time, and of subsequent times, cover similar sorts of events. Smollett's prose, on the other hand, strikes me as somehow lighter than many other such works. “Roderick Random” isn't precisely funny, but it's certainly amusing, and if memory serves, the authors later novels are genuinely hysterical. That skill starts here.
Benshlomo says, If a piece appears early in a person's career, it may still contain gems.
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