Tom Sawyer Abroad

Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Jim find themselves travelling far beyond their familiar surroundings in a flying craft. Their unexpected voyage carries them across the Atlantic towards North Africa, where the unfamiliar landscape challenges what each believes he knows. The distance from home makes their disagreements about the world both useful and comic. Mark Twain gives Huck the task of relating an adventure in which practical observation repeatedly encounters Tom's confidence in information gathered from books. Jim contributes another perspective, making the companions' conversations as important as the unusual means of travel. Explanations that sound certain do not always survive contact with what they see. The story combines imaginative travel with satire of prejudice, pretension and second-hand knowledge. Its humour grows through the friendship and differences of the three travellers, asking how people understand an unfamiliar place when they carry familiar assumptions with them and are reluctant to admit the limits of their understanding.