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A review by ben_miller
Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini
3.0
This is a book about pirates, treasure, swordfights, betrayal, cannonballs, Caribbean islands, the roaring main, and ladies in fetching corsets.
The last thing you'd expect from such a book is for it to get tiresome and repetitive, to trudge through the same formulaic episodes again and again, to gloss over the kick-ass rapier duels in order to linger on the minutiae of colonial administration - and yet this is what happens.
Here's every chapter of this book, pretty much: Captain Blood is in a sticky situation. Nobody thinks he can get out of it alive. Captain Blood comes up with a plan just crazy enough to work. The plan works. Everyone talks about how amazing Captain Blood is.
This is great the first few times. But the protagonist's relentless suavity and brilliance starts to get old, and eventually becomes downright irritating. I mean, this guy can do no wrong. From his piercing blue eyes (described in numerous faintly erotic passages) to his impeccable fashion sense, from his unerring eye for strategy to his skills as a miracle healer, Peter Blood is perfect.
He can't lose a fight. Two seventy-gun Spanish warships? No problem, consider those puppies sunk. Invincible stone fortress? Flattened. Drunken pirate king with a cutlass? Dead in two sentences.
It starts to get ludicrous. Captain Blood is eloquent, handsome, and has a finely calibrated sense of honor. His enemies are unfailingly ugly, vicious, small-minded brutes. And then there's the love interest, Arabella, as boring as she is "slim, cool, and beautiful."
Captain Blood is a good read for putting in context why writers and readers turned increasingly over the course of the 20th century toward the flawed, fallible hero (or in some cases anti-hero). He or she is much more interesting. Captain Blood, vaulting from triumph to triumph despite the odds stacked against him, quickly grows dull.
That said, you can also see why this book has survived when most of its ilk are forgotten. Sabatini is a better-than-average writer in the adventure genre, though he expends most of his energy in long scenes of two men declaiming angrily at one another, or the aforementioned hot-and-bothered descriptions of Captain Blood. And it's a prototypical pirate adventure tale, employing every sturdy cliche - in fact, it's probably responsible for creating a lot of those cliches.
Suggested further reading would be Richard Hughes' [b: A High Wind in Jamaica|188458|A High Wind in Jamaica|Richard Hughes|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388190660s/188458.jpg|2166961], written about seven years later, which subverts every expectation of the pirate genre while still involving lots of bloodshed, subterfuge, and seafaring.
The last thing you'd expect from such a book is for it to get tiresome and repetitive, to trudge through the same formulaic episodes again and again, to gloss over the kick-ass rapier duels in order to linger on the minutiae of colonial administration - and yet this is what happens.
Here's every chapter of this book, pretty much: Captain Blood is in a sticky situation. Nobody thinks he can get out of it alive. Captain Blood comes up with a plan just crazy enough to work. The plan works. Everyone talks about how amazing Captain Blood is.
This is great the first few times. But the protagonist's relentless suavity and brilliance starts to get old, and eventually becomes downright irritating. I mean, this guy can do no wrong. From his piercing blue eyes (described in numerous faintly erotic passages) to his impeccable fashion sense, from his unerring eye for strategy to his skills as a miracle healer, Peter Blood is perfect.
He can't lose a fight. Two seventy-gun Spanish warships? No problem, consider those puppies sunk. Invincible stone fortress? Flattened. Drunken pirate king with a cutlass? Dead in two sentences.
It starts to get ludicrous. Captain Blood is eloquent, handsome, and has a finely calibrated sense of honor. His enemies are unfailingly ugly, vicious, small-minded brutes. And then there's the love interest, Arabella, as boring as she is "slim, cool, and beautiful."
Captain Blood is a good read for putting in context why writers and readers turned increasingly over the course of the 20th century toward the flawed, fallible hero (or in some cases anti-hero). He or she is much more interesting. Captain Blood, vaulting from triumph to triumph despite the odds stacked against him, quickly grows dull.
That said, you can also see why this book has survived when most of its ilk are forgotten. Sabatini is a better-than-average writer in the adventure genre, though he expends most of his energy in long scenes of two men declaiming angrily at one another, or the aforementioned hot-and-bothered descriptions of Captain Blood. And it's a prototypical pirate adventure tale, employing every sturdy cliche - in fact, it's probably responsible for creating a lot of those cliches.
Suggested further reading would be Richard Hughes' [b: A High Wind in Jamaica|188458|A High Wind in Jamaica|Richard Hughes|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388190660s/188458.jpg|2166961], written about seven years later, which subverts every expectation of the pirate genre while still involving lots of bloodshed, subterfuge, and seafaring.