New Book Out

[Capt. Sterling]

For all of you who might be interested... Review from the New York Times

"Arrr!

By SARAH HUGHES

SILVER

My Own Tale as Written by Me With a Goodly Amount of Murder.

By Edward Chupack.

275 pp. Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. $23.95.

The resurrection of fiction’s most popular characters — in novels like Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “March” and Donald McCaig’s “Rhett Butler’s People” — has become a popular genre in recent times. But these books, with their well-polished 21st-century prose, have little in common with Edward Chupack’s “Silver,” a scabrous reimagining of the life of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous creation. Instead, this witty romp resembles nothing so much as George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, with their deliberately antique 19th-century style. Like Flashman, Long John Silver makes no apologies for his behavior. And, like Fraser, Chupack makes no belated attempts to find heroism in an antihero.

“Treasure Island” fans should note that “Silver” isn’t simply a retelling of Stevenson’s novel from the perspective of the villain. Characters like Jim Hawkins and Dr. Livesey appear only late in the action, while other members of the original cast play very different roles. Hard-drinking, big-talking Billy Bones edges from the periphery toward center stage, as do a host of new figures. In this refracted universe, only Ben Gunn and Pew remain much the same, Pew creepily self-serving and Gunn a haunting, insubstantial presence whose motives remain, as ever, unclear.

Lording it over them all is Silver — an unabashed rogue, a proud “Bristol dog” with a slippery conscience and a way with the sword. Captured, fever-struck, he’s bound for England and a swift end on a long rope. But he refuses to go quietly, telling his unnamed captor that “I will not keel over until I kill you.” Unable, for the time being, to manage that feat, he regales the ship’s cabin boy with “my true adventures, the good, the evil, the blessed and the cursed of my life at sea.”

And what adventures they are. Chupack’s Silver turns out to be a knavish Scheherazade, staving off death with tall tales of men murdered and women loved, of drinks downed and ships plundered. His words flow in a torrent as seemingly endless as the North Sea he claims to love, and ultimately as cold.

Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” was, above all, a romance, but Silver’s world, as imagined by Chupack, is brutal and essentially venal. Money — or the lack thereof — haunts every page. Bones are seen not just on the pirate flag but everywhere; Silver claims to have left them “scattered on every shore of every land.” Betrayal is a continuing theme. Underpinning the whole murderous enterprise is the story of a treasure whose secret might be found in the Tower of London, and possibly within the very pages of Chupack’s book.

How much remains of Stevenson’s original story? It’s there in parts, seen through a dark lens and now more of a cautionary tale. This isn’t “Treasure Island” revisited, nor is it a sequel. Like the pirate he celebrates, Chupack has taken a bit here and a bit there, plundering Stevenson’s novel to create something glitteringly original. In his essay “The Art of Writing,” Stevenson admitted that “Treasure Island” was itself fashioned of gleanings from the works of Defoe, Poe and others. The man who unrepentantly declared that “stolen waters are proverbially sweet” would almost certainly have approved of Chupack’s efforts."

Sarah Hughes has written for The Guardian, The Observer and The Sunday Times of London.

[Quartermaster James]

Thanks for the heads-up Sterling! I've just contacted the local library to put it on hold.

Sounds like a good read; the idea reminds me a bit of John Gardner's Grendel.

[MadL]

Now this sounds like a REAL story of Treasure Island! Bout time the pirates get to speak fer themselves!