Pirate King by Laurie R. King

[lightreads]

Pirate King by Laurie R. King

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So this is Laurie R. King writing a book about fictional Mary Russell who has written another memoir of an adventure with Sherlock Holmes, this one about the time she went undercover as an assistant to a crew making a silent movie about a crew making a movie about The Pirates of Penzance.



By all rights, you should need to diagram out the layers of narrative and meta narrative, but you don’t. As usual, King passes but lightly over these points, and in fact pauses briefly to make fun of critical readings of narrative and identity constructs.



No, basically, this is a romp from Portugal to Morocco, with real pirates and fake pirates and a lot of actresses and a parrot. Don’t bother hoping for a classic mystery, or anything more than a desultory and deliberately silly bit of plot frippery. These aren’t critiques, mind you. I mean, this book thinks it is somewhat more hilarious and charming than I thought it was, but it was pleasingly diverting. There just isn’t much besides the frippery, and a definite lack of Holmes. And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is not my Sherlock Holmes. He is hilariously functional, just for starters.





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Comments

[cahn]

Huh. How much Pirates of Penzance is in there? I think how much I want to read this is directly proportional to how much PoP-acting is in it...

[lightreads]

Hmm! I wouldn't have thought of it until you said something, but you might like this. It got the songs irreversibly stuck in my head, if that tells you anything. The characters sing at plot-relevant moments, and the main narrator has a lot of affectionately exasperated things to say about the play. It's very . . . present, at least in the broad strokes.

[cahn]

It got the songs irreversibly stuck in my head, if that tells you anything.

It does! I think I shall have to go check it out.