H.E. Bates Companion

Bates relates details of a visit to Western Samoa and to Valima (where Stevenson lived at the end of his life) to establish that the novel "is by no means as far-fetched as it might seem." He then discusses at length the difficulties inherent in writing a "very short story" or, in the case of Stevenson's work, a novella, eventually praising the author for utilizing "selection, compression, restraint, economy, impressionism; the oblique ray of light, the sudden cut, the inch or two of canvas left unpainted." He finds as well that Stevenson "is swift to build, in a few sentences, an atmosphere...he is clever, if not indeed masterly, at the impudent, thrown-in sentence...he never lets his story drag." Acknowledging that Stevenson "is neither Tolstoy nor Maupassant," he says that the work "aspires to be nothing more than what is sometimes known as a rattling good yarn -- and what is wrong with that?" In The Beach of Falesa (Robert Louis Stevenson, London: The Folio Society, 1959, pp. 9-18).