Jack Shandy to the Rescue

A Review of Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides

Back when I didn't know Tim Powers from Stephanie Powers—or even Austin Powers, for that matter—I tried to read one of his novels, Declare, and didn't get very far. I found it overly complex, densely-written and populated by uninteresting characters.

On the negative side, that might sum up in a nutshell the other Powers' novels I've tried to read, too. I found Anubis Gates impenetrable, and The Stress of Her Regard was just, well, kind of dull.

Maybe this experience colored my initial reaction to On Stranger Tides. Despite its weird collection of pirates, zombies, ghosts and wizards, I wasn't exactly thrilled with it on my first read-through. I felt confused more than anything else. But I love Powers' prose and, thinking I must have missed something, tried again.

Ah, much better! The second time was the charm. The key is to concentrate.

Here's the problem: Characters vanish and reappear as different people—Anubis Gates does this sort of thing a lot, too—and every character has his own secret agenda that makes it hard to say what the novel was actually about: It was about a bunch of different stuff. Also, by the end of the book significant action begins to take place off-stage between chapters and shifting points of view make for some jarring transitions. Powers might have tried to cram too much book into too few pages.

So you have to concentrate.

It's worth the effort. Once you unravel the various plotlines, you are rewarded with a story that is at once absurd and grotesque—two great tastes that go great together, in my book.

The story revolves around Blackbeard's search for the Fountain of Youth. Accompanying him, for reasons of their own, are—besides an assortment of living and undead pirates—an insane, one-armed academic, his wife—well, part of her anyway—his daughter and his repulsive physician/wizard, and a puppeteer-turned-pirate named Jack Shandy (whose puppeteer-ing skills are put to hilariously grisly use towards the end of the novel) who has fallen in love with the daughter.

If none of the characters rise above simple caricature, at least Powers spares the reader momentum-killing scenes of pure character development. Here, plot is king and not a single chapter is wasted. Jack Shandy is a typical SYMPRO (sympathetic protagonist), for example, while Elizabeth, the daughter, is the classic DAMDIS (damsel in distress). In fact, Shandy seems less an 18th century pirate than the time-traveling American from Anubis Gates (as does the main character in The Stress of Her Regard, too, frankly). Oh, well, the wooden ships keep the novel grounded in history, even if nothing else really does.

While Powers presents none of this in overtly comic terms, an undercurrent of humor pervades the entire novel. But it is the quality of Powers' prose that keeps me reading. Here's a nice passage introducing Blackbeard (the whole scene in which Blackbeard first appears is good, starting with the "kalunk...clunk of the oars knocking in oarlocks" from across the dark sea culminating with the description of the pirate I reproduce here):

"Blackbeard strode up the sand slope toward the fires, and paused for a moment where it leveled out, a big, jagged silhouette against the purple sky; his three-cornered hat seemed too tapering and long at the corners, and with the points of red light bobbing around his head he looked to Shandy like some three-horned demon newly climbed up from Hell."

Even when his pitches don't quite reach the plate, his imagery is unique and colorful:

"...he was acutely aware of each armed man as he would have been of a scorpion clinging to his clothing..."

Reaching its zenith in his description of zombies:

"...their eyes were the milky white that, in fish, was a sign of having been dead too long."

"Their bare feet, shuffling across the deck, made sounds like someone rolling dead toads down a shingled roof."

Who doesn't know that sound?

Though not without its faults and requiring a decent effort on the part of the reader, I'm recommending On Stranger Tides without reservation. I'll probably read it again. All in all, a fine man-book. I wish there were more like it.