The Quadroon, by Mayne Reid

Finishing Forever Amber on the first day of January, I searched my computer files for another book to read.

I had a file containing ebooks that were set aside to be read in 2018, but had somehow not made their way into the queue. Several of these ebooks were translations of the novels of  Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. I transferred a number of the ebooks to my Kindle and began reading The Cabin (La barraca). I went on to read The Torrent (Entre Naranjos), Sangre y arena (Blood and Sand) and reread  Los cuatro jinetes del Apocalipsis (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse). 

In The Torrent , Blasco Ibáñez mentions that the protagonist, Rafael Brull had read the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid. Not being familiar with Reid, I immediately typed his name into a search engine and came upon a wikipedia page about him.

Mayne Reid (April 4, 1818 – October 22, 1883) was born in Ireland, and lived for a time in the U.S., - even fighting in the American-Mexican War (1846–1848).

The wikipedia article goes on the explain that Reid wrote several action filled, adventure novels along the lines of Robert Louis Stevenson. Reid's novels were an inspiration to Teddy Roosevelt, Arthur Conan Doyle, and obviously, Vicente Blasco Ibáñez.

Reading such high praise of Mayne Reid, I knew I'd want to read at least one of his novels. Project Gutenberg has more than 50 of Reid's novels available for download; I did not know where to begin.

The same wikipedia article lists his anti-slavery novel, The Quadroon as one of his best selling. No better place to start, I thought.

Published in 1853, the story takes place in Louisiana. For reasons unclear to me, the protagonist chooses to go under a false name - Edward Rutherford. Coming from Britain, Rutherford is appalled by the brutality and atrocities inherent in slavery. Rutherford falls in love with a slave named Aurore who is described as a "quadroon". In slave societies, a quadroon was a person with one quarter African and three quarters European ancestry. Rutherford wishes to marry Aurore, but cannot because she is a slave and because of  her African ancestry. The two, of course marry in the end, but not in the State of Louisiana.

The novel does contain quite a lot of action and is surprisingly suspenseful at times. I was a little put off by Reid having the need to describe the flora and fauna of Louisiana in such detail. His foreign born, 19th Century readers may have found the descriptions interesting, but this 21st Century reader thought such descriptions slowed the pace.

In the beginning, I found Reid's "negro dialect" for the slaves off-putting as well. However, Reid also gave his uneducated, white, redneck characters a stereotypical drawl, so I was willing to give him a pass.

All in all, although obviously dated, I give The Quadroon a positive rating.