|
The Fox and the Fury Written by Dan Parkinson
 Originally published in 1999 by Pinnacle Books
352 pages
It had been a long time since I read a book about pirates. I think the last one had colour pictures on every page and there was not a two-legged, two-eyed pirate to be seen in them. Dan Parkinson’s diverting little page turner demands to be taken only slightly more seriously.
Set in revolutionary America, The Fox and the Fury is happily free of the patriotic drivel that drowns so many popular American treatments of the period. Like the author, Captain Dalton of the Mystery would prefer to get on with the job in hand, and smuggling a valuable cargo tends to get you fired upon by just about everyone. Dalton’s own crew is just as diverse, peopled at times by German deserters, naked savages, captured Spanish pirates and a celebrity look-alike. Their conflicts and inability to communicate are the source of much of the book’s comic relief but border on the farcical. Parkinson showed great restraint in leaving the pantomime horse out of his final draft.
In spite of its characters, The Fox and the Fury deals with many serious issues. What is it that drives men to unthinkingly kill others who speak the same language, and who were countrymen but a generation earlier? Who is harder to understand, an Indian with a thick cockney accent or a German farmer? Who smells worse, the Spanish or the French? Read this work and wonder no longer.
Parkinson’s novel is actually the second in a series, but stands alone perfectly well. My main gripe with his otherwise explosive action movie of the bookshelf is that its style slowed it down too much. Cockney-speaking Indians can be funny, but pages of impenetrable dialogue are not. Moreover, for a casual acquaintance of the age of sail, the long comparisons of different ships were baffling and tiresome. Ketches, xebecs and brigantines with varying assortments of mizzenmasts, trestletrees and top-gallants sailed past my uncomprehending eyes. Fortunately, I quickly discovered that all the difficult passages in the book could be read as "Avast ye!" without any detriment to the story.
Yarr.
|
