Gideon Defoe - The Pirates!: In an Adventure With Scientists, A Novel

NOTE: You may notice, if you are astute or have enough time on your hands, that the picture above and the name of this product category disagree. The picture is the correct option, as "The Pirates! In An Adventure With Ahab" has not been published, and has only a tentative release date of October 2005. Hence this review is off the image shown above, not the product category. Perhaps some wisened Epinions soul will rectify this.

Gideon Defoe is twenty-nine years old and lives in London. He wrote this book about pirates to impress a girl.

So begins The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists by Gideon Defoe with an absolutely disarmingly charming author biography. Happily, this is only the beginning of the fun in this riotous treasure of a little book published towards the end of 2004, that can easily be read in a couple of hours with time for toilet breaks. Fittingly, the quote on the front cover- "Hilarious. Destined to Become a Classic of Pirate Comic Fiction" is by Eric Idle, as this book contains more than a few nods to the wacky offbeat humour of Monty Python.

The story is that the Pirate Captain's crew are bored and adventure-less. The crew don't have names, but are instead referred to as "the one with the accordion" or, my favourite, "the pirate with the nut allergy". These pirates love nothing more than a bit of roaring or some sea shanties (back on deck the other pirates had finished their shanty- which had been about how a beautiful sea-nymph had left her rich but stupid Royal Navy boyfriend for a pirate boyfriend because he was much more interesting to talk to and could make her laugh). But what they love most is their Captain, an imposing figure with a luxuriant beard who is truly wedded to the sea, which in his case is not just an excuse for not being able to get a girlfriend or for being gay.

Though a brief series of wacky circumstances, the Pirates! end up running into the Beagle, carrying a young Charles Darwin about to carry out a duel with his old friend FitzRoy over both being in love with the same woman, Lady Mara. Fortunately for the story, less fortunate for Lady Mara, a cannonball flies through and kills her at this point which leads to embarrassment all round for Darwin and FitzRoy. The cannonball signals the arrival of the Pirates. Turns out that the Bishop of Oxford is blackmailing Darwin by holding his brother, Erasmus, hostage and with threats to kill him should Darwin give his greatest triumph- a chimpanzee named Mr Bobo that thinks it is a gentleman (a man-panzee)- a public airing. So in the spirit of companionship, the Pirate Captain and his motley ham-loving crew go to Victorian London to rescue Erasmus and help young Darwin promote his man-panzee Mr Bobo. As you can see, this is realist literature at its best.

Defoe, who has such a wonderful pirate name himself, gleefully jumps all over scientific history, the Pirate Captain has a 'sneer like Elvis', with elan (Defoe is a trained scientist, coincidentally) and happily acknowledges the complete lack of research in this petite novella that was originally written as a pub dare. Or for that matter, any writing skill at all. Yet he has a fantastic gift of charm. His description of Victorian London had me snorting happily-

There was soot and orphans everywhere, and gas-lit cobbled streets full of fog and sinister gentlemen out for a night of illicit murder. It was a strict and unforgiving society- looking at a piano, eating too much butter, dancing with elan- the sour-faced Queen Victoria forbade all these things.

The thrilling finale that takes place in a recognisable Museum of Natural History in London (the giant redwood and brontosaurus skeleton in the magnificent foyer play key roles) is also undeniably fab. The Bishop of Oxford and the Pirate Captain are mano a mano in the Minerals Room ("arguably the most boring room in the entire museum") where the two characters duel with mineral specimens and quote their atomic weights at each other as if it is the most natural thing in the world for a pirate with a luxuriant beard and a scheming maniacal bishop to be not only throwing minerals at each other, but carefully choosing their weapon by atomic weight.

Several of the chapters feature footnotes, liberally littered throughout. They start off as useful little tidbits of scientific information but steadily degenerate- for example he footnotes 'black' with:

Black looks best on persons who have black in their features (hair, eyes, brows, and lashes), although black can be worn by most people for very dramatic occasions

Defoe seems to not only channel Monty Python, but Walter Moers' brilliant 13 and a Half Lives of Captain Bluebear, Janey Preger's Sprezz! (still, in my mind, the finest literary work ever published), Edward Gorey and Lemony Snicket. His writing style is rough around the edges, but this makes the book all the better, and there is also a very British sense that as he wrote the novella, he was also constantly taking the p/ss of the fact that he was writing a book in the first place- vis a vis the walking the plank scene in Chapter 5 that clearly is reference to something only known to Defoe and his circle of friends. I also loved beyond measure the 'Comprehension Exercise' at the end of the book which is a pitch-perfect parody of high school writing exercises-

Question 1: What do you think the themes of this book were? Several commentators have described the main theme as 'pirates'. Another theme might be said to be 'ham'. Would you agree?

The story goes that although Defoe wrote this book to impress a young lady in a pub, despite the brillance of said book, the young lady in question still didn't put out. Frigid cow. Quite frankly if Mr Defoe wrote this book to impress me, I would be bearing his children as I type this review.

Unlike this review, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists has one of the funniest and best closing lines ever published.