The Very Odd Bookclub – October

Erewhon by Samual Butler

First published 1872, Samuel Butler’s book is, on the face of it a satire of Victorian life, morality and politics in the tradition books like Jonathan Swift’s Gullivers Travels. Butler creates his own peculiar world, Erewhon (an anagram of ‘nowhere’) and stages in it the events designed to point to the failings that he saw in his society. That would be enough to put it on the odd list, but there are also some elements regarding the rise of the machine age that are rather unusual for the time. After the success we had with Flatland, I’ve been eager to take a run at another odd book from the same period and the references to Erewhon that I’ve read in other books suggest that, although a very different sort of story, this may be just as much fun.