The Pirates! In an Adventure with the Romantics

March 30, 2009
Pirate Captain returns in this installment of Defoe's loony pirate yarns (The Pirates! in an Adventure with Ahab
; The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists
), only to lose the Pirate of the Year awards. (Though Captain's beard is “fantastically glossy and luxuriant,†he has oiled himself in preparation for a swimsuit round that doesn't exist.) Smarting from his loss, Captain retreats to the island of St. Helena, where—to the chagrin of his crew, including “the pirate with the scarf,†and “the pirate who liked kittens and sunsetsâ€â€”he delves into bee husbandry. Alas, geography, goats and the machinations of Napoleon Bonaparte threaten to disrupt a life of bucolic contemplation. Lovers of Monty Python and the novels of Cabin Boy
star Chris Elliott will appreciate this sendup of swashbuckling sea adventures.

July 16, 2012
In Defoe’s rollicking fifth novel in the series, the pirates are delightfully irreverent, inane, and idiotic. Previous adventures have involved Napoleon, “the Communists,” famous scientists, and Captain Ahab, but this outing begins with a trip to the pirates’ private bank in Geneva, where they are seriously overdrawn. A newspaper ad connects them with three emblematic figures from the romantic movement who are looking for “exotic adventure”: poets Byron and Shelley as well as Mary Godwin, who will soon write Frankenstein. The “Pirate Captain” (his mates go by equally generic names, such as “the pirate with gout”) offers the services of his ragtag crew and his ship, and the odd, but consistently comic adventure gets underway. The plot, ostensibly the search for a “lost Socratic dialogue,” takes them to London (where they pick up mathematician Charles Babbage), Oxford, and eventually to the Carpathian Mountains and the home of “Count Ruthven” (an obscure reference to an early vampire novel by Byron’s mistress, Caroline Lamb). Sophomoric and knowing, equal parts satire and farce as if written by Monty Python, the novel proves Defoe to be clearly on more than familiar terms with the romantics, and he skewers everyone and everything in a laugh-out-loud performance. Agent: Eric Simonoff, Janklow & Nesbit.