Sailing through Michael Crichton's Pirate Latitudes

After my recent dire experience with The Island, Peter Benchley's 1979 pirate adventure (see my post here), I was leery of another "best-selling" author tackling the same subject. I was doubly leery when that author was the late Michael Crichton, a writer whose brilliant and innovative ideas are invariably balanced by a nonexistent sense of pacing, characterization and style.

And yet, his 2009 novel Pirate Latitudes surprised me, much as his 1976 novel, Eaters of the Dead. This new book was discovered as a completed manuscript among his computer files after his death, and it has the feel of a pet project. As such, perhaps he paid more attention to crafting a plot that pays off, rather than a series of incidents that simply stop when the book runs out of pages (i.e., Jurassic Park). Whatever the reason, both Latitudes and Eaters avoid the pitfalls of Crichton's books set in the contemporary world.

Charles Hunter is a privateer in Jamaica's Port Royal, attacking Spanish ships under the protection of the British governor. When he gets word of a Spanish galleon anchored in an impregnable harbor, he hatches a plan to steal it, and its considerable treasure.

And that's really it. There's not a lot of digression, just a straightforward plot with lots of action and damn near every pirate cliche you could want. There are hurricanes, attacks by giant squid, sword fights and cannon broadsides. Hunter is as smooth with the ladies as he is with the waves. Each member of his crew has a specialty, and they all manage to save the day at least once. The villains are suitably rogueish (all could be played by Basil Rathbone), and only the sex and violence make it an adult book. It's Pirates of the Caribbean for grownups.

Crichton (or his staff) did their research as well, because there are plenty of obscure historical details worked into the story, mostly legitimately. But even at that, there's something thin about it, a sense that it's more a film treatment than an actual novel. We learn only enough about the characters to justify their actions, and although the settings are vivid, they still don't feel like places real people live. Still, perhaps that's enough. No one should expect depth from the guy who wrote The Lost World.

Here's the British book trailer (much cooler than the US one):

No treasure in The Island

I started reading Peter Benchley's 1979 novel The Island sitting in a waiting room, for lack of anything better to read. And the sucker hooked me.

For those who don't know, the late author was the son of Nathaniel Benchley and the grandson of Robert Benchley, both literary figures of high reknown. He was also the author of Jaws, the novel that was the Twilight of the early Seventies.

Jaws the book is nowhere near as exciting as the classic film adapted from it: it's a potboiler, filled with contemptible characters that even the author doesn't seem to like very much. But it sold like gangbusters, and set Benchley on an unsuccessful quest to replicate its success with a series of water-based thrillers (The Deep, Beast and White Shark, one of the worst books by a so-called "major" author I've ever had the misfortune to read).

The Island was his second novel after Jaws (following the sunken-treasure tale The Deep) and centers on magazine writer Blair Maynard (a typical name for a Benchley hero; the main character of The Deep was named "Romer Treece," Beast's hero was "Whip Dalton," and so forth). Maynard and his twelve-year-old son, Justin, head into the Caribbean to investigate ship disappearances, but what should have been a father-son lark turns unbelievably grim. They run afoul of an isolated population of inbred descendants of 17th-century pirates who co-opt Justin into their ranks and plan a grisly end for Maynard when he's no longer useful. These are not the rollicking buccaneers of Errol Flynn and Jonny Depp, but disgusting, bloodthirsty killers with appalling levels of hygiene.

The first third of the novel is a crackling good mystery-adventure with a surprisingly realistic father/son relationship. It was this aspect that caught my eye and kept me reading. Maynard wants to be a good dad, and tries very hard to stay connected to Justin despite being divorced from the boy's diffident mother. He's conscious of his status as a role model, and even if he never quite lives up to it, he sincerely tries. And Justin is depicted as a normal kid, neither precocious nor infuriatingly dense.

Unfortunately, once the Maynard lads are captured by the pirates, the novel's considerable momentum slows to a crawl. Justin vanishes from the story for long stretches, and we spend our time with Maynard senior and the pirate woman who wants him to impregnate her (yep, you read that right). And here's a tip to you would-be adventure writers out there: if you want to keep your readers on your hero's side, don't have the villains give him an enema. In graphic detail. Really. For any reason. If your plot demands it, then you should seriously re-evaluate. Sometimes your fetishes should stay private.

Eventually Maynard realizes that Justin likes the bloodthirsty pirate life, and so the battle becomes one for the boy's soul. I won't give away the ending--hell, if you slog through the last third of the book, you deserve the suspense--but its impact is considerably lessened because we don't see Justin's gradual transformation from comic-reading 'tween to Blackbeard-in-waiting. I don't know what Benchley was after, exactly, but what promised to be a neat modern twist on Treasure Island becomes instead one more sad artifact on the trail of a writer trying to reclaim the buried treasure of his debut novel.

One more visit to Treasure Island

I just finished reading a heavily-abridged version of Treasure Island to the Squirrel Boy; it was a little above his head, but we did a chapter a night, with a lot of, "Remember, this is the guy who...." Anyway, going through the story again made me think about a couple of common misconceptions about the book, usually based on the simplified film versions.

1. It's a kid's book. Not so. It's written from an adult perspective, looking back on a childhood experience. That adult viewpoint informs every aspect of the story, especially the dichotomy between the child's understanding of interpersonal relationships among men (the only female character in the novel is Jim's mother) and the later, wiser adult's. In fact, that's the main thing Jim learns: who to trust, and how far to trust them. Jim also faces real violence from adults who would quite happily kill him; nothing child-friendly in that.

2. Long John Silver is a lovable rogue. Not hardly. Silver is a true hard-core pirate, and while he does bond with Jim, he also wouldn't hesitate to murder the boy if it suited his purposes. Jim's relationship with Silver is the heart of the story, but Jim learns fast, and he never makes the mistake of fully trusting the one-legged pirate. Wallace Beery and Robert Newton never really captured the edge of danger that Silver has in the book; the only film version that does stars the late Charlton Heston as Silver and a young Christian Bale as Jim; alas, it's never been released to DVD.

I hope to read my son the full text version in the next couple of years, when his attention span is a bit stronger. He gets a great story, and I get to do pirate voices; are there better perks in the world?