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

Just about every young boy in the world goes through a phase when he wants to be a pirate. Who can blame them, really? After all, pirate life is full to the brim with so many great, carefree activities. Plundering, forcing each other to walk the plank, singing rousing sea shanties, feasting on ham, seducing mermaids, racing one another on the backs of giant turtles, grooming their luxurious beards, cheating at miniature golf, mumbling "arrr" under their breath, signing autographs, riding around in hot air balloons and so on.

What? Yes, of course I'm talking about pirates. You know, the peg legs, the hooks where the hands should be. They're always wearing those three pointed hats and those bright, colorful scarves, or jaunty black and white striped vest when they aren't dressing up as women to infiltrate amusement parks, scientist conventions, and the like.

Okay, I'll admit, these may not be the traditional pirates of history, or even the glamorized pirates of the silver screen. They are, however, the very essence of piratehood as envisioned by first-time author Gideon Defoe for his 2004 novella, The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists.

Taut, gritty, intense action. Rich character development. Historical accuracy. None of these are anywhere to be seen in The Pirates! Rather, Defoe's book is a surreally goofy romp of absurdist humor in the same vein as Monty Python, Terry Pratchett, or the woefully short-lived television series Andy Richter Controls the Universe.

On the surface, there's an overly forced feeling that the book it taking itself far too seriously, throwing in footnotes about historical references and feigning towards educational lessons in the test. Such "extras" thrown into the book almost make it feel like an overly pretentious grade school adventure book, especially when you look see a preachy footnote about the dangers that discarded plastic bags pose to giant sea turtles. For every dry, saccharine, educational footnote, though there are six or seven bizarrely goofy tangential footnotes, such as the note about rum, which starts out with well meaning bits of trivia, such as the fact that Lord Nelson's body was preserved in a barrel of rum after the battle of Trafalgar, but soon meanders its way into a Mai Tai cocktail recipe. For those willing to play along with the book's exaggerated sense of faux self-importance and laugh along with the author under the surface, it's an undeniable hoot.

The plot is no more complex than your average young reader novel at the local bookstore. Likewise, The Pirates! is no more plausible either. In a nutshell, The Pirate Captain and his rough and tumble gang of sailors (including the pirate with a scarf, the pirate in green, and the albino pirate - none of them have actual names, just one-dimensional personalities and a single defining physical characteristic each) act on some faulty information and attack the HMS Beagle, thinking it's a royal treasure ship. Chagrined and little embarrassed, the pirates rescue Charles Darwin from the now sinking HMS Beagle and agree to make up for the blunder by bringing Darwin back to England, where they promptly get caught up in web of intrigue that involves Darwin's missing brother, a chimpanzee dressed up like a high-society gentleman, P.T. Barnum and the Elephant Man, dozens of scientists, and "Soapy" Sam Wilberforce, the evil Bishop of Oxford. Of course, the pirates never get too caught up in things for them to pause for a rousing sea shanty or for a fine ham dinner. After all, what would pirate life be without ham and sea shanties?

As the story stumbles its way from seemingly unrelated tangent to unrelated tangent, everything falls into place just a little too well. Every clue the pirates stumble upon turns out to be of monumental importance to the intrigue that plagues them. Every step they take during their investigation turns out to be the right one, even though they're usually too daft and self-absorbed to realize it. Everyone they meet is tied in somehow to the evil Bishop of Oxford's plans. It's all too neat and tidy to be plausible (although really, that's just one of many reasons the book is implausible). We could easily accuse Dafoe of falling into the same trite oversimplification-of-plot flaws that plague the first few Harry Potter books, if we didn't know that Defoe were mocking such a structure with a wink and a smile.

The Pirates! has the same subversive world view as the Series of Unfortunate Events books. Defoe even makes the book feel like it's the forth or fifth installment in a series, with references to previous adventures the Pirates have had (The Pirates! in an Adventure with Cowboys, The Pirates! in an Adventure with Whales, etc.). Indeed, children will probably enjoy the book for all its goofy silliness (and don't worry, the more ribald jokes will go right over their heads). But it takes an adult to fully appreciate the humor of The Pirates!. It takes a more educated man to appreciate the juxtaposition of Darwin, who sailed on the Beagle in the 1830's, with the elephant man, who rose to fame in the 1880's. (Never mind the fact that neither was born until well after the height of the pirate age.) Kids will miss out on the fact that Charles Darwin and the Bishop of Oxford really did get into a huge public feud about whether man did indeed descend from apes (although to prove his ideas, the version of Darwin presented here doesn't publish a book, but rather resorts to a scheme that might be more fitting for the world of, say, I Love Lucy). The whole feel of the book is almost like it was written by an overly creative, hyperactive, D minus student who knows just enough historical references to get by, but has no idea how truly clueless he really is.

As a whole, the book is delightfully irreverent, but perhaps a little too much so for all readers. If you're looking for anything that could be classified as "literature," you'll be sorely disappointed. For those looking for a light, goofy escape from the norm, though, will grin their way through the book. The biggest complaint these folks'll have is that the book goes far too quickly. Most readers could make their way through the book's hundred and thirty pages in a long Saturday afternoon. It's just enough to suck you in to the strange, silly world that Defoe creates, only to leave you hungry for more. If you've got a soft spot for surreal, goofy comedy like I have, you'll finish the book with a tiny spark inside that yearns for Defoe to write further adventures for The Pirate Captain and his crew in the future. But even if we never see another installment again, The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists still stands as comedic diamond in the rough for this year.