Everyone loves pirates, don’t they? Not the Somali kind, but the Caribbean sort that used to say arrr a lot. There’s a rather good film of Captain Blood with Errol Flynn in the title role and, having watched quite a few pirate films lately, I thought I’d pick up the book.
I wouldn’t bother if I were you. It’s only a couple of hundred pages but feels like far more. The story meanders along, one episode not really flowing into another in a way that decent editing hid very effectively in the film, but makes the book feel as though it should have ended but there’s another fifty dreary pages to get through before you can go to bed.
The action sequences are flabby, the characterisation of anyone other than Blood paper thin and his motivation is sketchy at best. There’s a love interest that’s supposed to carry the events along but, as the woman in question appears only very briefly in a chapter when you’re mostly concerned with an escape that’s one of the better passages, so it’s difficult to find a reason to care.
There’s no real sense of place (he might as well have stayed in Somerset for all the flavour of Tortuga you might have been hoping for), no suspense or conflict that isn’t solved with some predictable flash of insight on Blood’s part and a terrible lack of humour.
Worst of all it’s terribly racist. I found out about half-way through that it had been published in 1922. I had assumed it was much earlier. The terrible crime committed upon Blood at the beginning of his story is his unwarranted enslavement. He feels the weight of it on his shoulders for page after boring page, but has no problem with keeping black slaves of his own on his escape. He doesn’t bother trying to help them escape, doesn’t even seem to notice their condition. There’s no hint of this contradiction in the narration, no sign that the author is aware of it.
There’s a lot of hand-wringing about the effects of imprisonment on the human spirit here, but none of the black characters are even named.
Avoid this book.
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