Adrift on the vernacular river

"I'd a knowed," announced Huck Finn near the close of Mark Twain's immortal picaresque tale, "what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't agoing to no more." Luckily for us, Huck the reluctant writer did settle down at least once to tell the story of his adventures. The result is not only a pioneering classic of American - and world - literature, it is also a celebration of the power and unexpected poetry of vernacular speech.

Like Whitman's, Twain's lasting gift to American writing is a native voice, speech as spoken. Huck's comic language is shaped by dialect which charges the narrative with an energy and pace sustained throughout a sequence of often burlesque happenings.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) described Huckleberry Finn as "a book of mine where a deformed heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat". This is curious, almost misleading, because Huck's heart and conscience, far from working in conflict, are united against his boy's understanding of the codes of his society, a society based on slavery. Wised up though he is, Huck the son of a cruel "tree toad white" drunken father, is nevertheless primarily a child, and Twain very cleverly never allows his reader to forget this. The boy's adventures certainly occur in the adult world, but they are motivated by the imagination of childhood as initiated by Tom Sawyer, whose head is full of the romantic adventures he has read.

Huck is a rawer, earthier sensibility, aware that he is not as "well brung up" as Tom, and is unhappily enduring the efforts of Widow Douglas to "sivilize me". Debating the issue of helping the slave Jim to escape with the fact that he is stealing someone else's property, Hock knows that Jim is a commodity, but he is equally conscious that he is a human being. The great moral climax of the novel occurs when, faced with either informing Miss Watson - Jim's owner - of the runaway black's whereabouts, or rescuing Jim, Hock decides on the latter: "All right, then, I'll go to hell." The antics of the scheming thieves preparing to rob the Wikks family of their inheritance disgusts the watching Huck, who remarks: "It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race." Not surprisingly, he takes the pair on to ensure the family are not cheated.

Drifting down the mythic Mississippi on their raft voyage enables Huck and Jim to form a deep, convincing bond. Hock recalls the time he saved Jim from slave traders tracking runaways "by telling the men we had small pox aboard and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now . . ."

First published in 1885, nine years after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberrry Finn has had its share of criticism as well as praise. For every reader who has laughed at Hock's mad escapades, the humour of his asides and the irony lurking throughout, there are those who have frowned at his inspired lies, and it must be conceded that the anarchic Huck is certainly one hell of an inventive liar. But far more contentious is the underlying exploration of a racist society, in which Twain gave voice to the conflicting resources and directions of American culture in the post Civil War period.

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens to Southerners who had moved from Virginia to the slave holding lands of the Louisiana purchase and settled in Hannibal, Missouri, Twain had served briefly in the Southern army but was never convinced by notions of Southern chivalry. His eyes were always open to the reality of life in the South and what living there meant for anyone born black.

Throughout the narrative, characters both black and white freely use the word "nigger". Objections have frequently been made to the characterisation of Jim as a frightened, superstitious man, as well as his being a commodity to be sold. In fact, considering the wealth of comic caricatures in Twain's work, the character of Jim is extraordinarily subtly drawn. Guilty about not having brought Jim to a place of freedom, Huck "gut to feeling so mean and miserable I most wished I was dead". Yet as he sits lamenting to himself, Huck begins to listen to Jim who is also speaking to himself "saying the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children." Also interesting here is Hock's reaction: "It most froze me to hear such talk ... Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free." Huck begins to feel guilty about Jim stealing his own children, "children that belonged to a man I didn't even know: a man that hadn't ever done me no harm". Twain's handling of Hock's mixed feelings is brilliant.

Racism and slavery have never been popular themes in American fiction. There are those who would prefer to edit out that particular chapter, of American history. Yet it is important to note that Twain set his novel some years before the Civil War when racism and slavery were unalterable facts of life and history. Pre war Mississippi Valley life gave him his finest material. He also liked the balance of pastoral innocence and worldly corruption which seemed to shroud the riverbank he know it was still the nation's great north south turnpike, the crossroads of slavery and abolition.

Much of the genius of Huckleberry Finn is neatly balanced between its author's strong moral sense, comic flair and canny commercial instinct. Twain knew that readers would object to certain aspects of the book and so, directed by his practical judgment, carefully edited the final version. In 1990, the first half of his original manuscript was discovered in - you've guessed it - an old, forgotten steamer trunk stored in a Los Angeles attic. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - The Only Comprehensive Edition, edited by Victor Doyno, is now available (Bloomsbury, £16.99 in UK), and so, for the first time, Twain's subversive river odyssey may be read as he originally wrote it. The excised passages are neatly re inserted into the text and explanatory footnotes are included.

Reading the book as child was an unforgettable experience; revisiting it as an adult alerts one to its Dickensian form. Indeed, Huck could wells be a descendant of the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist (1837-8). Even more interesting is the contrast between Stevenson's Jim Hawkins as a more passive narrator of Treasure Island (1883) and Huck's vivid delivery: "my heart jumped up amongst my lungs." Elsewhere, when acknowledging Tom Sawyer's fancy manners, Huck says: "He lifts his hat ever so gracious and dainty, like it was the lid of a box that had butterflies asleep in it and he didn't want to disturb them." And the appalling tricksters, "The King" and "The Duke" are both comic if amoral confidence men straight out of Melville. Twain succeeds in providing Huck with a vernacular speech which is also a literary language.

Despite the claims of Melville's Moby Dick (1851), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn even with its admittedly weak ending is far more conclusively the first great American novel, and is certainly American fiction's source book. Hemingway declared: "It's the best book we've had ... There was nothing before." While his comment does a major disservice to Hawthorne and Melville not forgetting Washington Irving - the life, comedy and humanity of Huckleberry Finn almost justify it. Most of all, though, Hock's breathless and shrewdly subtle saga is one of those rare books: a classic read in childhood which remains a masterpiece through life - and all the better for this complete text.