An Old Review: Marryat--The Privateersman
There was a time when I wrote reviews of books on Amazon--just as an exercise and for the fun of it. Amazon tells me I wrote 12 reviews and that 42 customers found the reviews helpful. I got an e-mail today saying that my review of a book had been helpful. I had completely forgotten the book--it was one I had recorded for the Library of Congress: The Privateersman by Marryat. You would think that reading a book aloud would somehow make it stick in your memory--but no: I recall nothing about it.
Here is the review:
"The previous reviewer has set out the plot--such as it is--of this book, and I do not wish to repeat it. I would describe the book as a real,old potboiler. I have just finished recording it, and I must say that a great deal of the narrative is tedious in the extreme: the dialogue is very stilted by modern standards of verisimilitude: and the succession of coincidences that enable our priggish hero to escape from slavery,forced marriage,burning at the stake,being hanged as a pirate,or hung drawn and quartered as a traitor--all these simply defy belief. And since the narration is in the first person, one knows all along that the narrator will escape--it is just a question of which far-fetched coincidence will save him this time. Nor do I think the sea-battles are up to snuff in comparison with other Marryat books. No doubt the book appealed to audiences at the time it was written--but we no longer have much sympathy with a hero who is unflinchingly brave when facing the prospect of horrible torture, devotedly faithful to his dearest love when offered a comely Indian princess, and much comforted by his endless study of the Bible, especially when this hero is always spouting off sentiments in sentences that could have been crafted by Samuel Johnson or Gibbon.
If you are a true Marryat fan, and like this particular genre--then buy The Privateersman. But as the previous reviewer suggested, many of the other Marryat books are much better."
At present I am reading in parallel two novels. "The Decline and Fall of the Great Powers" by Tom Rachman, whose first novel was ecstatically reviewed, and "Expo 50" by Jonathan Coe--whom Nick Hornby describes as "...the best English novelist of his generation." So far, the Rachman has not really grabbed me, and the Coe is amusing in a very old school Brit novelist way--pleasant, insightful social comedy set against the background of the World's Fair in Belgium in 1958, which I actually went to after finishing at Oxford in the summer of that year.
I am also recording a real potboiler, "An Irish Doctor in Peace and War"--the ninth in the series of books about an Irish country doctor, of which I think I have recorded four. The author seems to have turned the series into an industry, and I suspect he gets a lot of help, judging by the acknowledgements. Personally, I have had a bellyful of Doctor Fingal Flaherty O'Reilly and the lovely oirish folk of Ballybucklebo. They can all go and jump into Belfast Lough. Maybe the last novel in the series (say, number 18) might be "An Irish Country Doctor and the Mass Suicide at Ballybucklebo."