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lee_foust 's review for:
Captain Blood: His Odyssey
by Rafael Sabatini
It's pleasant to discover that even as late as the 1920s someone was still writing in the age-old and time-tested romance format--an episodic narrative of adventures following a pair of star-crossed lovers--and doing it so damned well! I'm honestly startled by how well written and entertaining this romance is! It's also a bit deeper than the form usually allows, morally--more than I expected it to be anyway--not skirting around the realistic downsides of pirating and the land-grabbing and conflicts between Spanish, English, and French imperial forces fighting over the wealth of the new world in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century--not to mention the poor planters and merchants who must have often found themselves in the middle of such conflicts and facing the dire consequences of pillage and rapine when soldiers and/or pirates came to town. Also the strong anti-slavery message, the spot-on descriptions of the bullies who so often end up in power in our political and military institutions, their petty personal grievances and utter incompetence to wield power to obtain anything resembling justice, and the moral integrity of the social outcast protagonist...all fabulous! I even teared up on the penultimate page when the lovers were finally disabused of their misapprehensions of each other and came together.
I can only imagine that my own disgust with institutional violence and my love of the critical outsider who acts as our conscience regarding governmental and military abuses of power probably stems from reading swashbucklers like this when I was young and impressionable. Certainly such narratives are head and shoulders above, say, a James Bond novel or the like, which I find dramatically fun, but also must abhor because of how they flaunt their blind patriotism cum racism cum sexism with bigoted depictions of the weak, women, and people of other races, as double-dealing scoundrels always to be abused and/or merely used, but never to be trusted or considered truly human. Sabatini lets no one of the hook here. (Pirate pun intended.)
I can only imagine that my own disgust with institutional violence and my love of the critical outsider who acts as our conscience regarding governmental and military abuses of power probably stems from reading swashbucklers like this when I was young and impressionable. Certainly such narratives are head and shoulders above, say, a James Bond novel or the like, which I find dramatically fun, but also must abhor because of how they flaunt their blind patriotism cum racism cum sexism with bigoted depictions of the weak, women, and people of other races, as double-dealing scoundrels always to be abused and/or merely used, but never to be trusted or considered truly human. Sabatini lets no one of the hook here. (Pirate pun intended.)