Ahoy, from the adult side
From the unstoppably fertile mind of Daniel Handler — otherwise known as Lemony Snicket, multi-million-selling phenomenon behind A Series of Unfortunate Events and other books for children — emerges his latest novel for adults. (Although which adults, exactly, is a question never satisfactorily addressed.)
We Are Pirates is very movielike: its stars are Gwen and Amber, San Francisco 14-year-olds who launch a cockamamie pirate scheme. Among their crew are a senility-plagued oldster, a disaffected Haitian immigrant, a luckless boy and a parrot (naturally).
The tale’s mysterious narrator frequently references “that time in America,” when people did things — as the principal character’s father does — such as buy condos they couldn’t afford, among other equally normal-sounding acts. Where, we wonder, are we in time? Decades ago? Post apocalypse? Right now seems likely, just as our narrator is very likely a tease. Perhaps San Francisco, like America itself, has always been a land of pirates and treasure-seekers.
Before the action kicks into high gear, Handler paints a credible character in Gwen Needle, a girl beset by the heartache and boredom common to 14-yearolds. Gwen’s woes are achingly familiar: her unrequited love for a handsome boy on the swim team; her anger at her distant mother; her love for her kind but clueless father, a man who dreams of success in radio when not lustfully eying his new assistant.
Dad, “Phil Needle,” appears in the novel’s parallel plot — a farce that underscores his shaky moral compass — while Gwen’s mother spends her days painting landscapes in solitude. Welcome to Dysfunctional Families 101: Gwen’s new friend Amber even has a “Stepmonster,” like the self-destructive Demi Moore character in the ’80s hit, St. Elmo’s Fire. Together the girls set out to overturn the “boring squall of their lives.”
But first Gwen must escape the “shiny” new family condo in Frisco’s Embarcadero neighbourhood, where we observe Phil in despair over her behaviour: “a landlubber, with no sea legs even in his own house.” In fact, Phil harbours no piratical longings, being obsessed with producing a radio show about a dead blues singer. Yet seafaring metaphors abound, long before Gwen and her mates seize a fake pirate ship used by a local theatre troupe. Antique language is the hallmark of this nascent seafaring gang. “Verily” is the response favoured by Amber, Gwen’s kindred angry spirit. When their plan to shanghai “gorge” (gorgeous) and narcissistic Nathan Glasserman goes awry — his younger brother Cody shows up instead — their elderly “Captain” woos him with a line from an old paperback: “We are outlaws in our lives and outcasts in our families.” Cody’s in.
Both ends of the age spectrum — adolescents and the elderly — chafe under house rules. Not allowed to take the bus, hating her new neighbourhood, Gwen rebelled by stealing egregious amounts of junk from a local drugstore. Caught and punished with volunteering in a care facility, she bonds with elderly Errol and his stash of piracy tales. “It will generally be admitted that Captain Blood is the most sublime story that has ever penetrated into the human mind.” Admitted by whom?
Given the disturbing events to come, how culpable is Gwen when two people on the boat are murdered and robbed? Like her dad, she is ambitious but flawed, longing for a glamorous life and a glamorous name (“Octavia” is the name she gives to drugstore security) while blithely breaking the rules. Perhaps her not-yet-developed teenage brain is at fault, although her dad surely has no such excuse.
All proceeds with the snap, crackle and pop of a witty, tightly plotted escape tale, until snap and crackle suddenly turn to “yuck” (blood, bodies) in a scene from which — in this adult’s view — the tale never quite recovers. Nevertheless this homage to classics such as Captain Blood and A High Wind in Jamaicaends well for most of its principals. A clean getaway, you might say, with some deadly exceptions: strange days indeed. Nancy Wigston is a freelance Toronto writer and frequent contributor to these pages.