The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

by Gideon Defoe and Gideon

1837: the Victorian Era approaches and the golden age of piracy draws to a close. Worried that his pirates are getting bored with a life of winking at pretty native ladies, sitting about on tropical beaches, and trying to stick enough jellyfish together to make a bouncy castle, the Pirate Captain decides it's time they had an adventure. A chance encounter with the young Charles Darwin - embarked upon the voyage of discovery that will one day make him famous - leads the Captain and his rag-tag crew from the exotic Galapagos Islands to the fog filled streets of Victorian London, where they encounter grisly murder, vanishing ladies, a diabolical Bishop, the Elephant Man, and have an exciting trip to the zoo. THE PIRATES! is a rollicking read: uproariously funny, unexplainably daft, gently knowing and insightful - one of the very few books to deal with the weighty issues of science versus religion, whilst at the same time featuring a lot of roaring and running people through.

• ISBN10: 0297848852
• ISBN13: 9780297848851
• Publish Date: 26 August 2004
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 23 January 2008
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
• Imprint: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 144
• Language: English

Reviews

[pamela]

Fun(ish), short, some vaguely amusing moments, but easily finished in an hour or two. I enjoyed it but wasn't blown away. I did very much enjoy the footnote facts and the satirical discussion questions at the end. I do now however have an odd craving for ham...

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists follows the story of the Pirate captain and his unorthodox crew. On their adventures they meet Charles Darwin and his highly trained and sophisticated “man-panzee” Mister Bobo. Darwin has been banished from London by a rival scientist and manages to convince the Pirate captain to help defeat his enemies.

While this book and the rest of the series is not aimed at children, it comes as a real surprise that the stop animation movie adaption was. I’ve not seen the movie but I can’t imagine a cannon ball ripping through a woman’s head would make for good movie viewing. Having said that I wouldn’t mind seeing that, the humour would be well worth seeing. The humour really relies on clichés and irony, while will make for a very entertaining experience. While the book has the humour there is a visual aspect to some of the jokes that really would work better in a movie.

I think book really reads more like a script for a movie and while it isn’t laid out that way I can’t help but thing that a movie adaptation was the main goal of the author. I know of people who have seen the movie and then went on to enjoy the books and I think that might be the order required. I can’t help think the humour was a cross between Monty Python and Wallace and Gromit, yet again why I think the movie would work better.

While the rest of the book falls into the realms of cliché, this book is all about the humour and nothing else. I would have liked a better plot and better characters but clearly this wasn’t the focus at all. I’m really not sure if I want to continue with this series but for a bit of light reading I might return, but I have so many other books I want to read so I doubt I’ll be back anytime soon.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/03/16/book-review-the-pirates-in-an-adventure-with-scientists/