With his Booker Prize shortlisted The Trees (2022) and the recent Oscar-winning film American Fiction, which was based on his 2001 novel Erasure, Percival Everett is, at 67, enjoying the kind of mainstream popularity that eluded him for most of his career. His new book, James, retells Mark Twain’s classic but controversial The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of an enslaved Black man in the American South on the eve of the Civil War. It deserves to bring Everett his widest readership yet

The conceit is brilliantly straightforward, and readers will still enjoy reading James even if they are unfamiliar with Twain’s novel, in which Jim was practically silenced as a simpleton slave in what was a coming-of-age story for 14-year-old Huck, who comes to terms with his friendship with his enslaved companion despite the learnt societal prejudice

In Everett’s retelling, the eponymous James is referred to by his owners as Jim and carries two secrets. One is that he can read and write, which is divulged early on, while the other is hinted at throughout the book but only confirmed near the end. Everett leaves you in no doubt about James’ unremitting agony, fury, injustice, and heartbreak as he conveys his interior life in a way that Twain never did

Huck is the sole sympathetic white character in Everett’s novel, but James still has to pander to the boy and his friend Tom Sawyer because, as James observes on the first page: “It always pays to give white folks what they want.” Still, when James learns that he is to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter, he runs away, and Huck goes with him. They embark on a terrifying and enthralling journey along the Mississippi River, which involves kidnapping, shipwreck and murder, as James tries to reach the free states to the north, where he plans to raise the money to buy his family into freedom

They get separated on their journey, though Everett’s retelling fills in the gaps from Jim’s perspective. They also encounter other Twain characters like the bungling, shameless con artists King and Duke. Jim has many secrets, many of which relate to language and identity. He is both literate and literary, to the point that he dreams of philosophical debates with philosophers Voltaire and John Locke. Jim aspires to write a memoir, for which he craves a pencil and a notebook

In front of their white masters, the blacks are mindful not to break character and communicate in a lowbrow dialect. They otherwise code-switch, as Jim notes: “What would they do to a slave who knew what a hypotenuse was, what irony meant, how retribution was spelled?”

He adds: “White folks expect us to sound a certain way, and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them. The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us”

In his journey to free his family from slavery, Jim commits a string of crimes towards a shocking denouement that, perhaps unnecessarily, rewrites his entire relationship with Huck

Everett introduces a significant change: While Twain’s novel was set in the 1840s, James is set on the cusp of the Civil War, with a burgeoning abolitionist movement against slavery

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain tried to humanise Jim , but the novel reflected the attitudes of the 19th-century American South more than it challenged them. It reinforced patronising stereotypes about Black people and deployed the n-word far too casually. Everett redresses these failings, giving voice and individuality to James and exposing the stupidity of racism in a horrific story that is beautifully told. The result is a poignant yet powerful study of racial relations in a bygone era and a captivating homage to Twain’s original work