”On the crest of the dunes behind them, in sharp silhouette against the deep cobalt of the sky, they beheld a tall, lean figure scrupulously dressed i”On the crest of the dunes behind them, in sharp silhouette against the deep cobalt of the sky, they beheld a tall, lean figure scrupulously dressed in black with silver lace, a crimson plume curled about the broad brim of his hat affording the only touch of colour. Under that hat was the tawny face of Captain Blood.”
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Errol Flynn plays Captain Blood in the 1935 movie version of this book.
Doctor Peter Blood has settled down in Bridgewater to a quiet life of contemplation while tending to his geraniums when he is summoned to help the wounded rebels who have been fighting against the forces of James II. This conflict is called The Glorious Revolution of 1688, which might indicate to you who eventually wins. Peter Blood can’t care one whit about this civil war. He has had his fill of war when he served in France and would find war a frivolous pursuit if it weren’t so deadly.
While helping the rebel wounded, he is captured. Though Blood makes the case that he takes the Hippocratic Oath very seriously, the judge finds that by providing aid and comfort to the enemy much more seriously. He is sentenced to hang. His sentence, along with his fellow “conspirators,” is commuted to transportation to the crown’s plantations in the Caribbean. This isn’t leniency, but purely for financial gain. Why waste so much free labor at the end of a hangman’s rope?
Once in Barbados, Blood proves his worth as a doctor, which gives him more freedom of motion than his fellow slaves. The overseer's daughter, Arabella Bishop, learns of his plight and develops sympathetic feelings towards Blood. He and some of his friends escape the island and fall in with pirates. Blood is an intelligent man, and it doesn’t take long for his pirate brethren to discover his value as a tactician and learn to respect his courage. He is soon elevated to the captaincy, and thus begins the bloody reign of Captain Blood, held only in check by his own adherence to a conscience.
There are battles in this book described so vividly by Rafael Sabatini that they give me chills, but the moment where I felt that thrill in my stomach that sent a harpoon from my current self back to my ten year old reading self was this one.
”Levasseur, his hand on his sword, his face a white mask of rage, was confronting Captain Blood to hinder his departure.
‘You do not take her while I live!’ he cried.
‘Then I’ll take her when you’re dead,’ said Captain Blood, and his own blade flashed in the sunlight.”
Isn’t Levasseur a great name? There is also Cahusac, Hagthorpe, Wolverstone, Pitt, and one of Blood’s most ruthless enemies, Don Miguel de Espinosa. I love this line to describe Wolverstone: ”There was a great historian lost in Wolverstone. He had the right imagination that knows just how far it is safe to stray from the truth and just how far to colour it so as to change its shape for his own purposes.” Wolverstone is a storyteller, and Sabatini with that line also alludes to one of his own best qualities as a writer. He knows how to tell a story.
There is this great conversation at the beginning of the book The Club Dumas when two booksellers are discussing their favorite Sabatini book, and Lucas Corso declares his preference for Captain Blood. These are seemingly throwaway pieces of dialogue that probably don’t resonate with most readers, but it is the author speaking to a certain type of reader. Perez-Reverte is reassuring me that I am going to enjoy this book. The movie Ninth Gate is based on that book. If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, you really should.
This book is probably most famous for inspiring the 1935 movie starring Errol Flynn and directed by the Casablanca director, Michael Curtiz. Sabatini helped with the screenplay. I’ve not seen the movie in decades, but now that I’ve read the book, I certainly want to watch it again.
There is romance in this book as Peter Blood tries to win his way back to respectability so he could dare to hope to one day win the hand of Arabella Bishop. There ”’I do not number thieves and pirates among my acquaintance, Captain Blood’, said she.” It’s a dagger through the heart and I want to yell, Should he have stayed a slave? There are so many missed opportunities for them to reconcile as each misinterprets the other’s true intentions. The plot device of win the girl, lose the girl, and hopefully win her back is definitely in play. There are several moments when it feels all is lost, but the hardest moment is when Blood himself begins to believe that he can’t win. We’ve seen him overcome so much that we can’t hardly stand to see him so low.
I recently read Michael Dirda’s book Browsings, and he reminded me of how much I enjoy reading the books from the age of storytelling that spanned from the late 19th century and into the early 20th century. One of the many books he mentions in Captain Blood (1922), and I’m nearly tearing my hair out at the thought that I’ve never read it. How is this possible? Treasure Island, a book filled with pirates, was the book that made me a lifelong reader. I would have snapped up a copy of this book as a preteen and would have probably read it twice back to back, as I tended to do in those days with a book I really enjoyed. All's right with the world: I’ve finally read Captain Blood, and I fully intend to read other Sabatini books as well.
So there is some purple prose, with the best example being the use of the word empurpled. I found myself smiling as it continued to show up in the text. Sabatini didn’t have a computer program to tell him how often he used or overused a word. Another is irradiate, which had my modern brain thinking of nuclear exposure, but, of course, in those days the word was used differently. "Sunlight streamed down through stained glass, irradiating the faces of family and friends." I must say, though, that I now have a hankering to use empurpled in something I’m writing. Of course, it is one of those words that gives an editor a chubby as they slash it from your text. The audacity of this Keeten fellow to use a word like that!
This book stirred up a lot of memories for me of those many wonderful moments in my childhood when a book, like a tornado, swept me up and gave me dreams of an expansive, exciting life.
”One boat has been disappearing every other day for three years. That’s how it averages out, like the population clock downtown: every so often, bingo”One boat has been disappearing every other day for three years. That’s how it averages out, like the population clock downtown: every so often, bingo!, roll over another one. Tell you the truth, I don’t think anybody’s ever going to know what happened to those boats. Not to all of them...not to half of them.”
Reporter Blair Maynard smells a story, a big story. Hundreds of boats have disappeared in the same section of the Bahamas along with their two thousand plus passengers, and mysteriously, no one seems to be alarmed.
Misadventure? That’s a lot of misadventure.
The mysteries of the sea sometimes never reveal themselves. The ocean is vast and unpredictable, and sometimes even a veteran crew disappears without a trace. This feels different though. This doesn’t feel like a Bermuda Triangle. This feels like something methodical, something man-designed rather than a freakishness of nature. Under the pretense of a vacation with his twelve year old son Justin, he ventures out into this mysterious zone to find out the truth.
They disappear without a trace.
To the world, that is true, but they are very much alive, trapped in a world that existed a couple of hundred years ago. They’ve fallen into pages that would fit better between the covers of Treasure Island. Maynard soon finds himself at odds with his son and in a desperate battle for survival. His life isn’t worth the value of a bottle of rum, and he will have to dig deep within himself to find the feral, mental toughness to save Justin and himself.
I chuckled at one point when Peter Benchley alludes to Jacqueline Bisset and her wet t-shirt, which of course is in the movie version of his book The Deep. There is a movie version of The Island as well, starring Michael Caine. I’ve not watched it yet, but intend to watch it eventually.
The book is certainly not as compelling as his signature work…Jaws, but there are some thrilling scenes that certainly grabbed me as Maynard grappled with situations requiring a lizard brain that his life as a reporter had never activated. ”A hand clawed at his eyes, fingers probing to uproot his eyeballs. He stopped one hand, then the other, then felt teeth fasten on the skin of his cheek and tear away. He released a hand and punched at the biting mouth, and the hand he released drove a pointed fingernail deep into his ear.
His brain shrieked: Overboard!”
If you have ever fancied the life of a pirate, Benchley might disabuse you of those desires. Their lives were brutal, with harsh penalties for any infraction of the arbitrary rules, and certainly the scurvy bastards that Maynard and his son encounter are indicative of the unpredictable and untrustworthy men you’d be sharing the life with.
I’ve now read the first three novels that Benchley wrote. He only wrote eight. I will most likely venture forth with the rest eventually. These novels from the 1970s and 1980s are time capsules of the era before computers were readily available and before people were glued to cell phones. The lives of people back then seem more meaningful, less passive, as they are more engaged with the world around them than the world displayed in the pixels of the glass and plastic of Chinese-made time-wasters. We have more knowledge at our fingertips than we’ve ever had before, but somehow we individually seem to know less. For those who enjoy an escape to the world before it became enslaved by technology, these Benchley books are a breath of fresh air from a past that is quickly receding in the rearview mirror, never to be experienced again except for in the pages of books, old movies, and the songs that make memories come alive again.
”Dima mightn’t exactly have been spoiled for choice when it came to selecting a messenger, confessor, or prisoner’s friend, or whatever it was that Pe”Dima mightn’t exactly have been spoiled for choice when it came to selecting a messenger, confessor, or prisoner’s friend, or whatever it was that Perry has been appointed, or had appointed himself. She’d always known there was a slumbering romantic in him waiting to be woken when selfless dedication was on offer, and if there was a whiff of danger in the air, so much the better.”
When people are in desperate straits and in need of help from a stranger, they scan the faces around them for something in their features to reassure them, intuitively, that this person is the one most likely to render aid. In the case of Dima, the face he decides to entrust his life belongs to Peregrine Makepiece. Perry, an Oxford academic, and his barrister wife, Gail, are on vacation in Antigua. They are there during the off season to keep the cost of the trip within the means of their cash-strapped budget. Dima is a force of nature, a whirling dervish of expansive energy, and surrounded by an entourage of family, friends, and bulky men with heavy hands and dead eyes.
Dima challenges Perry to a tennis match, but this game isn’t about footfalls and line calls. Oh no, it is a much more dangerous sport of international intrigue. Dima has found by complete chance the perfect man to shoulder the burden of his problems. He is a money launderer not only for the Russian mafia but, as it turns out, a bag man for high ranking British politicians. Lots of dirty Russian money is about to be moved through British banks, and Dima knows the players, the method, and the origin of the money. He has suddenly become a huge liability to powerful men in Russia and Great Britain, who simply have too much to lose to take a chance on being exposed. Perry is left-leaning, suspicious of his government, but still patriotic. A man who has waited his whole life to step into the subterfuge of a Graham Greene novel. Dima needs him to help him broker a deal with MI6, and something in Perry’s romantic soul lights up like the London Eye.
Perry knows a guy who knows a guy, and the flash drive that Dima palms off to him to tempt MI6 makes its way through the labyrinth of offices until it lands on the desk of someone who finds Dima’s information intriguing enough to pursue.
Perry thinks he’s done his bit. ”That’s it. You’re on your own. I am, therefore I don’t spy.”
He is wrong.
Dima insists that Perry must stay involved. In a business rife with lies, double crosses, and deceptions, Dima can’t and shouldn’t trust the spies at MI6. Dima’s primary concern is the safety of his family, but to MI6 that is definitely a secondary concern. Perry and Gail both find themselves in over their heads, but they also find themselves caring about the fate of Dima and his family, and their faith in their own government will be sorely tested in the process.
One thing I really enjoyed about this story was the way Perry and Gail pooled their intelligence, keeping each other informed, and both contributed fairly equally to the process. I think there are too few examples in literature of couples being real partners in life. This is not a top tier Le Carre, but the chances of him writing a masterpiece that would rival his early work is improbable. Regardless, he is still writing spy thrillers that are better than 90% of his supposed competition. The negative reviews I’ve seen of his later work are frankly doing him a disservice and not giving him enough credit for writing intelligent but maybe breezier books than what he did earlier in his career.
The 2016 Ewan McGregor movie has the same basic plot as the book. There are some annoying changes. They move the setting from Antigua to Morocco, which is okay. They make Perry a lousy tennis player, where in the book he is a really good tennis player. I actually like that aspect of his character. It makes the whole tennis match between him and Dima much more intriguing in the book. Most of the changes are irritating to this John Le Carre fan, but do not hamper my overall enjoyment of the movie. I would definitely recommend reading the book before watching the movie. Le Carre still has a deft hand with prose and building intrigue that movies struggle to replicate.
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