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Arrrrgh! Pirate tale won't keep ye very long

Little detail, character development in old Crichton manuscript

Reviewed by: Nick Martin

Posted: 12/26/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

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Crichton died in 2008 at age 66. (CP)

Pirate Latitudes

By Michael Crichton

HarperCollins, 320 pages, $28

Thrill-a-minute American novelist Michael Crichton died last year, but that hasn't stopped his publisher from exhuming a manuscript for a historical action-adventure novel he dashed off three years earlier.

It's 1665 and the British outpost of Port Royal, Jamaica, harbours hordes of cutthroat pirates plundering the treasure-filled galleons of the Spanish Main. Pre-eminent among the buccaneers is Charles Hunter, a Harvard-educated captain who's Jack Sparrow crossed with Han Solo.

Hunter gets word that a storm-damaged Spanish galleon laden with gold and silver has pulled into a nearby island for repairs. Alas, the island's harbour is protected by enormous cannons and a fortress with 300 Spanish troops commanded by a sadistic monster.

The impregnable fortress itself is protected from the rear by a cliff hundreds of feet high, the base reachable only through snake-infested jungle and a sheer rockface which no one has ever been able to climb.

Hunter begins assembling a pirate crew to capture said galleon. What follows contains scenes straight from umpteen adventure movies, including a giant squid attack from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Note that the allusions are to movies, not books. Crichton wrote some very good novels among his two dozen works (The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park pop to mind), but about 20 years ago, they started to morph into outlines for screenplays.

Pirate Latitudes can be read in an evening. It's bereft of much detail, character development and suspense.

While the early chapters suggest that the novel will build to an attack on the fortress and a cutlass showdown between anti-hero and villain, all of that is dispensed with halfway through, and rather easily so.

Then we're off to sea battles, a hurricane, cannibal attacks, treachery, buried treasure, the sea monster, more treachery, bloody revenge, and too many daring rescues to count.

Each action piece is introduced with no buildup, dealt with in half a dozen pages, and tossed aside for the next improbable adventure.

Crichton has always preferred caricature to character, and those have been mostly white men. He's never been good at writing women and his attempts at ethnocultural diversity are cringeworthy.

Hunter's munitions expert in Pirate Latitudes has a name, but is referred to usually as "the Jew," not only by characters in dialogue, but by Crichton in narration. The cannibal attack evokes memories of 1930s movies with white actors in blackface.

Enormous numbers of people get slaughtered. Throats are cut, intestines are skewered, body parts fly, people die slowly and painfully. Here, Crichton does provide details.

But parents can rest assured that while Crichton's book is intended for non-demanding adults with short attention spans, Pirate Latitudes is also safe for kids.

The non-stop violence and excruciating gore are certainly acceptable by contemporary standards. The sex, both bawdy and non-consensual, is implied rather than described. And these are the first pirates in literary history who don't swear.

Nick Martin is a Free Press reporter.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 26, 2009 H7

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