The Bondman by Hall Caine

Brother vs. brother in the icy North Atlantic

There is a good chance you’ve never heard of Hall Caine, but at one time he was one of the most popular authors on Planet Earth. His book The Eternal City is the first novel to have sold over one million copies worldwide. Caine’s novel The Bondman, published in 1890, may not have achieved such record sales, but it was still a blockbuster bestseller for its day and firmly established the author’s international success. The story of The Bondman takes place in Iceland and on the Isle of Man, which is located between Great Britain and Ireland. Although born in England, Caine was of Manx (Isle of Man) heritage and later settled there to become that island’s biggest celebrity and favorite son. He also wrote The Manxman, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a silent film. Prior to writing The Bondman, Caine made a research voyage to Iceland to see that country firsthand. 

Rachel Jorgenson, the daughter of the governor of Iceland, is betrothed to marry a Danish count of her father’s choosing, but instead she elopes with a burly Icelandic fisherman named Stephen Orry. Unfortunately, Orry turns out to be an abusive drunkard, and he abandons Rachel and their newborn son Jason, who are left to live in poverty. When Jason grows up, he vows that he will track down his father and kill him, or, if the old man is already dead, he will wreak his vengeance on any of Orry’s offspring. Meanwhile, Orry has run off to the Isle of Man, where he fathers another son, Michael, with a woman of ill repute. Orry mellows in his old age and has a change of heart. He regrets what he did to Rachel and realizes what a terrible father he has been, so he leaves Michael with the governor of the Isle of Man, who raises the boy lovingly in relative wealth. When Michael grows into a man and learns of his father’s history, he vows to find Rachel and his long-lost brother and help them in any way he can. Thus, we have two brothers from two different islands, who have never met, hunting each other down for opposing reasons, each unbeknownst of the other’s motives.

A lot happens in The Bondman. In every chapter, someone is being born, married, killed, imprisoned, elected governor, or relocated to some foreign land. One could say that there’s never a dull moment in The Bondman, but he or she would be lying. Despite the multinational scope and all the momentous events, each chapter is bogged down in a lot of tedious verbiage. The characters engage in much discussion of what’s happened or what’s going to happen. In most cases, the outcomes of these conversations are a foregone conclusion, but one still has to sit through them anyway. Realism is not a major concern in this romance, as the character’s lives are entwined in an intricate web of coincidental encounters and mistaken identities. It somewhat calls to mind the byzantine plot of The Count of Monte Cristo, but Caine’s web is not as skillfully spun as Alexandre Dumas’s. I admired the clever construction of the plot, with all its cyclical occurrences and karmic retribution, but I can’t say that I greatly enjoyed the reading of it.

The Bondman is an adventure romance in the vein of Sir Walter Scott (Rob Roy) or Robert Louis Stevenson (The Master of Ballantrae). The positive aspects of Caine’s writing don’t quite measure up to those two Scottish greats, yet he does share some of their faults. Like Scott and Stevenson, the writing is often clumsily antiquated, the plot elements so heroic they’re predictable, and the very Britishness, Scottishness, or Manxness of the cultural and historical references can be a chore for the ignorant American reader to wade through. (Just to prove I’m not anti-British, James Fenimore Cooper’s novels often have the same problems.) After reading The Bondman, I might say there’s a good reason Caine has been forgotten while the other aforementioned authors are still widely read. If you are really into classic books by Scott, Stevenson, or Cooper, however, The Bondman might be right up your alley.