On Stranger Tides, by Tim Powers. Audiobook read by Bronson Pinchot.
I've read On Stranger Tides before, but not recently. The audiobook was getting rave reviews and I was in the mood for something light and action-filled, with lots of accents. It delivered.
As is typical for Tim Powers, this involves a completely batshit premise, with even more batshit complications, all of which are worked out with meticulous logic and thematic unity, and not only has (completely batshit) explanations for actual weird historical events, but doesn't contradict anything in the historical record as far as I could tell.
This is the sort of book in which a French marionette artist comes to the Caribbean on a mission of revenge for his dead father, is forced to become a pirate cook, learns magic (there are at least two different magic systems), gets entangled in an elaborate plot to discover the Fountain of Youth because a mad professor wants to revive his dead wife and Blackbeard wants to get rid of the ghosts that have been haunting him ever since his first trip, and has multiple fights with zombie pirates. And that's just scraping the surface.
Nobody's mother is incarnated as a marmoset. But it's the kind of book where that 100% could happen.
Oddly, the scene which I had remembered most vividly doesn't happen at all. I had remembered that a sorceror could be regenerated if their blood falls into the sea. This is correct. I remembered a vivid, tremendously eerie, dreamlike scene in which a pirate sorceror's head is cut off, tied to a rope, and trailed behind a ship. The blood that oozes from his neck congeals, slowly grows into a large blob, and over a period of days or weeks, develops human shape and finally becomes the complete man again, at which point he climbs back aboard the ship, ready to take revenge...
Someone does in fact regenerate in the sea. But we don't see it happen, and all we're ever told about it is that the sorcerer regenerates in "a kind of egg." My version is better, right? But the thing is, this is the kind of book where my scene would fit right in.
Caveats: Anne Bonny appears only as a pirate's wife, not a pirate in her own right, and does nothing but hit on the hero. The heroine (not Anne Bonny) has some of the the least agency of a heroine in anything I've ever read. She is controlled by men, kidnapped, under a spell, drugged, or unconscious for literally the entire book short of the last few pages; she makes a couple attempts to escape, but they fail immediately. Tim Powers gets better at writing women later; this book is probably his nadir in that direction.
In more YMMV areas, there's a fat villain who's very very fat. However, there are also sympathetic/heroic fat characters. It contains white people doing magic with vodoun; also black people, and it's made clear where it comes from. But the main characters are white.
That being said, overall this was a ton of fun. The marionette thing is not just a quirky detail, but essential to the plot and comes up in multiple clever ways. There's great action sequences, excellent spooky horror sequences, and it really leans into the premise of "What if Blackbeard was a sorceror and had a ship crewed with zombie pirates? And also ghost pirates?" If you would like to read a book where a living crew of pirates fights a zombie crew of pirates while a pair of wizards are having a telekinetic duel in midair, here you go!
Bronson Pinchot did a great and very enthusiastic job with a million accents and voices.
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As is typical for Tim Powers, this involves a completely batshit premise, with even more batshit complications, all of which are worked out with meticulous logic and thematic unity, and not only has (completely batshit) explanations for actual weird historical events, but doesn't contradict anything in the historical record as far as I could tell.
This is the sort of book in which a French marionette artist comes to the Caribbean on a mission of revenge for his dead father, is forced to become a pirate cook, learns magic (there are at least two different magic systems), gets entangled in an elaborate plot to discover the Fountain of Youth because a mad professor wants to revive his dead wife and Blackbeard wants to get rid of the ghosts that have been haunting him ever since his first trip, and has multiple fights with zombie pirates. And that's just scraping the surface.
Nobody's mother is incarnated as a marmoset. But it's the kind of book where that 100% could happen.
Oddly, the scene which I had remembered most vividly doesn't happen at all. I had remembered that a sorceror could be regenerated if their blood falls into the sea. This is correct. I remembered a vivid, tremendously eerie, dreamlike scene in which a pirate sorceror's head is cut off, tied to a rope, and trailed behind a ship. The blood that oozes from his neck congeals, slowly grows into a large blob, and over a period of days or weeks, develops human shape and finally becomes the complete man again, at which point he climbs back aboard the ship, ready to take revenge...
Someone does in fact regenerate in the sea. But we don't see it happen, and all we're ever told about it is that the sorcerer regenerates in "a kind of egg." My version is better, right? But the thing is, this is the kind of book where my scene would fit right in.
Caveats: Anne Bonny appears only as a pirate's wife, not a pirate in her own right, and does nothing but hit on the hero. The heroine (not Anne Bonny) has some of the the least agency of a heroine in anything I've ever read. She is controlled by men, kidnapped, under a spell, drugged, or unconscious for literally the entire book short of the last few pages; she makes a couple attempts to escape, but they fail immediately. Tim Powers gets better at writing women later; this book is probably his nadir in that direction.
In more YMMV areas, there's a fat villain who's very very fat. However, there are also sympathetic/heroic fat characters. It contains white people doing magic with vodoun; also black people, and it's made clear where it comes from. But the main characters are white.
That being said, overall this was a ton of fun. The marionette thing is not just a quirky detail, but essential to the plot and comes up in multiple clever ways. There's great action sequences, excellent spooky horror sequences, and it really leans into the premise of "What if Blackbeard was a sorceror and had a ship crewed with zombie pirates? And also ghost pirates?" If you would like to read a book where a living crew of pirates fights a zombie crew of pirates while a pair of wizards are having a telekinetic duel in midair, here you go!
Bronson Pinchot did a great and very enthusiastic job with a million accents and voices.
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