The Pirates! In an Adventure with the Romantics, or: Prometheus Versus a Terrible Fungus
Gideon Defoe. Vintage, $14.95 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-0-345-80290-3
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. (Sept. 1)
Details
Reviewed on: 07/16/2012
Release date: 08/21/2012
Genre: Fiction
Paperback - 176 pages - 9780307274915
Paperback - 192 pages - 9780307274922
Paperback - 320 pages - 9780345802903
Other - 168 pages - 9780307489562
Hardcover - 177 pages - 9780375423987
Paperback - 80 pages - 9781599909448
Open Ebook - 126 pages - 9780345802910
Paperback - 213 pages - 9781400077502
Paperback - 189 pages - 9780753822227
Paperback - 226 pages - 9781408824979
Paperback - 220 pages - 9781408824962
Paperback - 80 pages - 9781599909578
Audio book sample courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio