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The Pyrates

George MacDonald Fraser

3.74 · Rating details · 1,315 ratings · 110 reviews

The Pyrates is a comic novel by George MacDonald Fraser, published in 1983. Fraser called it "a burlesque fantasy on every swashbuckler I ever read or saw."
Written in arch, ironic style and containing a great deal of deliberate anachronism, it traces the adventures of a classic hero (Captain Benjamin Avery, RN, very loosely based on Henry Avery), multiple damsels in distre ...more

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Paperback, 416 pages

Published September 1st 2011 by Lyons Press (first published November 17th 1983)

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Sep 18, 2013 Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing

What if piracy existed in the days of the television epoch? Then it would have been turned into a glamorous daily show.

One of the great things about pirate ships in the good old days was that they were purpose-built – not for cargoes of crude oil or containers or package tourists, but for knavery and conspiracy and swashbuckling and, in a word, Romance.

George MacDonald Fraser turned his pirate anecdote into a pulp screenplay deriding both swashbuckling fiction and the inanity of mainstream cinem ...more

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Feb 11, 2008 Dan Schwent rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: funny

I thought I'd paste in my Dangerous Dan review for this one. We'll see if it gets the appreciation the one for The Gun Fight got.

Dangerous Dan here, back to push you toward stories while he drinks a PBR and pretends to care about things other than women and alcohol.
One of Dangerous Dan's favorite movies as a young lad living in the back room of a whore house was The Princess Bride. When I finally learned how to read (it was before I shaved the first time but not much), I read the book and wanted I thought I'd paste in my Dangerous Dan review for this one. We'll see if it gets the appreciation the one for The Gun Fight got.

Dangerous Dan here, back to push you toward stories while he drinks a PBR and pretends to care about things other than women and alcohol.
One of Dangerous Dan's favorite movies as a young lad living in the back room of a whore house was The Princess Bride. When I finally learned how to read (it was before I shaved the first time but not much), I read the book and wanted more. Unfortunately, old Bill Goldman never wrote a sequel. Well, today I'll review the next best thing.

George MacDonald Fraser is best known as the writer of the Flashman Chronicles, a series of books about a rogue named Flashman who blunders his way into taking credit for all kinds of heroic deeds throughout history. In The Pyrates, Fraser takes uses the ability to make complete bastards likeable that he honed in the Flashman series to new heights.

The Pyrates features everything you like about pirate stories. It has a noble hero, a rogue you're not quite sure about, a buxom damsel in distress, vile villains, and a femme fatale that's even hotter than the heroine. Dangerous Dan's pants were definitely snug during some parts of the book.

The plot of The Pyrates is as follows. Captain Ben Avery is escorting the British crown on a sea voyage, along with Admiral Rook and his daughter Vanity. Vanity's the hot girl of the story. The ship is attacked, Vanity is kidnapped, and Avery is stranded on a sandbar. Enter Colonel Blood, the rogue of the piece and Dangerous Dan's kind of guy. He's a liar, womanizer, and cheat, and also quite handy with the sword. Avery's kind of naïve and stupid and a perfect ally for Colonel Blood. On the side of the villains are Don Lardo, a huge fat guy that's trying to steal the british crown, and his henchwoman, the lovely Sheba. She's like Catwoman to Avery's caped crusader and has provided Dangerous Dan with some interesting fantasies during dry spells.

Anyway, Colonel Blood is continually caught between wanting to do the right thing, wanting to get some from Vanity while she thinks Avery is dead, and wanting the crown jewels for himself. Like I said, Dangerous Dan's kind of guy except that he didn't take advantage of Vanity while she was asleep.

Aside from the dialogue and the sight gags, one of the funniest thing about The Pyrates are all the sly references to modern culture, again, just like the Princess Bride.

The writing is snappy and the dialogue is clever, much like that of the Princess Bride. If you liked the Princess Bride, you'll like this. If you didn't, Dangerous Dan is coming to your house in the dead of night with a roll of duct tape, a jar of Vaseline, and three large cucumbers. ...more

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Oct 20, 2020 Jamie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

If swashbuckling is your thing, this is the book for you. Buckles swash all over the place, swinging from the rigging, swordfighting in dank dungeons, cutting a path through everyone standing in the way, and romancing gorgeous (occasionally homicidal) women. And then there’s plunder, sea battles, and gold doubloons aplenty. Ya’ar matey, sail ho!

This is George MacDonald Fraser, best known as the author of the comic Flashman novels, whose titular hero is a rogue, a bully, a coward, and just about If swashbuckling is your thing, this is the book for you. Buckles swash all over the place, swinging from the rigging, swordfighting in dank dungeons, cutting a path through everyone standing in the way, and romancing gorgeous (occasionally homicidal) women. And then there’s plunder, sea battles, and gold doubloons aplenty. Ya’ar matey, sail ho!

This is George MacDonald Fraser, best known as the author of the comic Flashman novels, whose titular hero is a rogue, a bully, a coward, and just about everything else that an anti-hero can be. He is cunning but not very bright, and the humor in the books comes from watching him blunder into one outrageous misadventure after another, always escaping by the skin of his teeth, and somehow getting credited with all sorts of (unearned) heroic deeds.

My introduction to Fraser, however, came from a different direction entirely. He wrote one of the great memoirs of World War II, Quartered Safe Out Here (q.v.), recounting his experiences as a teenage infantryman in Burma during the last year of the war. The book brilliantly describes his fellow soldiers, endless marches plagued by heat, monsoons, and malarial vermin, and desperate fighting against Japanese who knew they were going to lose the war but were ready to die to the last man anyway. Few authors do as good a job as Fraser making readers feel what it was like to be there in the thick of things.

Pyrates is much more along the lines of the Flashman books, although it amps up the silliness to a degree that it reads like a 400 page Monty Python sketch. The author breaks from the story to talk to the reader about the characters and what he is planning to do next, and he never met an anachronism he didn’t fully embrace, so that even though the book is set in the 1670s, in the reign of Charles II, it is full of references to 20th century movie pirates such as Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn. Sometimes it seems more like a screenplay than a novel, with the anachronisms as stage directions, and Fraser was in fact a Hollywood screenwriter in addition to being a novelist, most famously Force 10 from Navarone and the James Bond film Octopussy. In Pyrates even the characters sometimes know they are in a book, as in “I am the hero, and my survival is essential. You don’t suppose you can stab me in the back on page 115, surely? The ludicrous notion!”

So, is there a plot at all? Surprisingly, yes. A book like this could easily have gone off the rails into an endless series of one-liners and throw-away jokes, but Fraser has tightly plotted every scene. There is method in his madness and discipline in his silliness. Multiple plot lines develop as heroes and villains stumble from one outrageous situation to another, and then everything comes together at the end in a silly but satisfying conclusion. There is the intrepid hero and a Flashman-like rogue who can sometimes behave honorably, half a dozen pirate captains based more or less on historical figures, cannibals, evil Spaniards for the plot to act against, and not one, or two, but three beautiful women to fall in love with the hero. One of the most interesting characters is a conniving Cockney pawnbroker who is smarter than the rest of the cast put together.

In today’s world this book would never see the light of day in its present form. For one thing, it is about a hundred pages too long; you can only sustain that level of madcap action for so long before the reader’s attention starts to wander. It also plays on stereotypes that would be out of bounds today, such as calling the black female pirate Sheba. The good guys speak impeccable Oxford English, and in one case the hero interrupts the rogue to remind him that ‘octopus’ is from Greek, not Latin, and thus the plural is not ‘octopi.’ The rest of the cast uses Hollywood pirate-speak or pigden English. Even when really funny the reader suspects publishers would consider it inappropriate for today’s sensibilities, as when the heroine, the rogue, and a mad gardener meet a squad of Spanish soldiers. Their corporal demands to see her passport (why not?, even though passports did not come into general use until the 20th century), and when she doesn’t have one – she has, after all, been kidnapped – he says

Ha, I know-a-yoor sort! You Eengleesh, you try-a to sneak-a into our country, try to take-a jobs from honest Spaneesh workeeng-pipple – like-a he wan’s to be a cabbage-lan’scaper, the old-a bum, an’ thee dame wan’s to be a topless waitress, mebbe, an’ you, wit’ your clarkie [Gable] moustache an’ your ‘Pliz’, you want-a to set up as peemps, I bet! You theenk,” he roared indignantly, “we don’t got cabbage-lan’scapers and topless waitresses an’ peemps of our own, who need-a the work, huh?

The Spaniards all talk like this, and when reading their lines I found that I automatically put them into the voice of John Cleese (“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”) from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In any case, the book was published in 1983 and in this bit of dialog perhaps Fraser was reflecting some uneasiness about the European Union’s proposed open borders laws.

If you liked Flashman’s adventures you will probably love Pyrates. Fraser can string together madcap shenanigans till the reader can’t help but laugh. And so, if you’re up for it, avast mateys, hoist the Jolly Roger, and sail with Captain Calico Jack and his murderous but merry buccaneers for the Spanish Main, where the treasure galleons are just waiting to be plundered. Ya’ar.
...more

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Apr 28, 2011 Jane rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: general-fiction

If I could give it six stars I would. I've read this book many times and it leaves me with that sense of wonder that I had as a child back full-force and sparkling. This book is fun, totally OTT, glorious fun. It would film like a dream but they'd ruin it so I hope that they never do. I guess PotC is close in feel in some ways.

There's so much wistful nostalgia here and it sweeps the reader along.

The characters are insanely perfect. Sheba. OMG, Sheba. She rocks. And who wouldn't want to slash Av ...more

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Mar 31, 2020 Bob rated it liked it · review of another edition

Nearly 400 pages of anarchic pirate silliness - but it stayed alive for me on the strength of Fraser's command of the story - the "tuppenny bloods and boys annuals", the historical novels of Rafael Sabatini, the movies of Fairbanks, Rathbone and Errol Flynn and other epics from the thirties and forties - all of this is baked into Fraser's DNA as a writer, and here it all is, synthesized into one giant, funny and brilliant yarn.

I think of it essentially as a tribute to the stories, movies, char ...more

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Apr 20, 2008 Tim rated it liked it · review of another edition

I have the sense I should like this book more. Maybe its because its about pirates and naval warfare (maybe naval hijinks is a better description), loving Forester and O'Brian as I do. Maybe its because Dirda put it in as number 3 on his list of top 100 comic novels. Maybe its the manic energy which the author brings to every page, he is obviously working very hard, has the conventions down, the language, making references (which I got about two out of every three - that foreigness of the shared ...more

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Nov 11, 2018 Lisabet Sarai rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I had previously read several books from the Flashman series, and knew that George MacDonald Fraser had a real knack for comedy. What I didn't realize before reading the bio in The Pyrates was that he wrote the screenplays for a number of successful films (including the James Bond film "Octopussy".

That cinematic experience is front and center in this hilarious take-off on pirate stories. The Pyrates offers fabulous characters, wonderful descriptions, and a very funny style. What you might not re ...more

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Apr 25, 2010 Karla rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: dead-tree

Very few authors can pull off comedy in historical fiction, but Fraser can. He proved that in Richard Lester's Musketeers movies back in the 70s. I read this book before I knew he wrote those screenplays, and now I can see his style quite clearly. It's insane and anachronistic, and also totally cheeky and infectious.

It helps to have at least a passing knowledge of the swashbuckling greats of Hollywood when reading Pyrates, because the references come fast and furious. I was LMAO throughout, and ...more

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Jan 20, 2011 Andrew Hill rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Funny, action-packed, and (unlike the Flashman novels) appropriate for young readers as well as old, "Pyrates" is a sort of paean to the pirate stories and movies that captivated GMF as a young man. It's wonderful, and it makes me mourn Fraser all the more. He will be missed. ...more

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Jan 05, 2021 🐴 🍖 added it · review of another edition

fundamentally there are just 2 jokes here -- anachronism and 4th-wall-breaking -- but both are done beautifully. ("it fell off a sedan chair" as excuse for being in receipt of a stolen jewel was a personal fave.) come to think of it, coulda stood to be a little more anachronistic in referring to the non-anglo-saxon peoples of the world (d*goes? really dude?) but this kinda approach of picking & choosing from sentence to sentence where to be historically accurate suggests all sorts of comic possi ...more

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Aug 28, 2019 Jamie May rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A romp through pirate trope. Satire of the old pirate swashbuckling movies.

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Nov 30, 2020 Michael Sullivan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Clearly a huge influence on the pirates of the Caribbean films. It should be better known

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Jul 23, 2011 Alanpalmer rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favourite

This is a Pirate tale like never before. It is a swashbuckling adventure for sure with all the necessary ingedients of a true english Hero and an equally english Damsel in distress, Brutal and slightly unhinged Buckaneers, mysterious Middle Eastern Pirates, the "lovable" rouge and incompetent Navy Captains. All this with the added humour of a litterrary genius depicting galley slaves Singing The Eaton Boat song and a hero complaining thet there is always a rowing boat behind a galleon for the he ...more

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Oct 26, 2011 Bev rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Just re-reading this.
I had forgotten how funny it is in places. You probably need to have sat through all those old movies with the likes of Errol Flynn to get all the jokes, but even without, there are still moments to savour.
It is a glorious send up of every bodice ripping, sword waving, buckle squashing, avast me hearties story you have ever seen or read.

"You can't kill me, I'm the hero and it's only page 111."
"You might not be the hero."
"Don't be ridiculous." ...more

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Feb 22, 2010 Mandie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Buckle your swash, mateys! Complete with non-stop action and danger, not to mention romance, treasure, pirate lairs, princesses, one legged dwarves and dashing heros wearing ruffle front shirts, The Pyrates is the perfect mixture of historical fact, artistic license, and pure silly! Unputdownable and laugh out loud funny!

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Jun 26, 2008 Wendy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This book is probably hard to find but, oh my, I thought it was so funny. This author did what we all want to do by writing a book using all the cliche's you can think of including heaving breasts. It might have been a bit off-color at some points. ...more

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Jan 14, 2010 Allison Thurman rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: to-loan

Some of the sexism/racism makes me flinch, but I'm keeping in mind that Fraser is parodying content from a less enlightened time with less enlightened characters. This book succeeds as ripping every cheesy 30s-40s swashbuckling silliness to come out of Hollywood :) ...more

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May 23, 2017 Siegbald TheReader rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I love Fraser's Flashman books, but this one was a bit disappointment for me.
It was basically a totally cheesy sketch, for a Mel Brooks-like comedy (as I know he indeed intented to write it as a movie sketch).
It was flat a too cartoonish for my taste. ...more

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Feb 24, 2019 Littlegreengoblin rated it liked it · review of another edition

A fun take on classic cliches. Reminds me of an adult novel version of the cartoon, “Dave the Barbarian”.

I have to admit, it takes a while to get used to the writing style of this book. There are a lot of heavy words, new vocabulary, and not to mention that the book starts off with a terribly long run-on sentence (I tried reading this book twice before actually pushing through with it and getting past the first few pages). But overall, once you get used to it, it’s an enjoyable tale and a funny ...more

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Sep 12, 2020 Jim rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Excellent and a delightful read. A farce for sure, and extremely well-done and written. I struggled with not giving 5-stars, and I'd definitely say it's a solid 4.5, generous soul that I am. I read the book relatively quickly, being bed-ridden with a back problem, and believe this to have further enhanced the experience, playing well into the author's frenetic pace and world-hopping storyline. Anyway, if you like some combination of (false and purposely-anachronistic) historical fiction and humo ...more

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Jul 22, 2017 David Cooper rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: old-favorites

Laugh-out-loud funny, it helps to be familiar with a bit of 17th century British history and what the golden age of Hollywood did to it. And if you like to talk like a pirate, you won't find better pirate talk than in this book (wi' a wannion!) ...more

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Jun 20, 2019 Erica Thomas rated it liked it

Shelves: abandoned

I really wanted to enjoy this book. The prose are hilarious and the descriptions lusious. But the 1980s sensibilities towards race and gender were just too much for me. When we got to the sexual assault jokes I had to put the book down.

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Oct 31, 2019 Kate rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: adventure, historical-novels, romance, read-a-thons

This had all the potential to be a great read. However, I have to admit to getting fed up with all the Yo-Ho-Hoing after about 50 pages and so the book took me a lot longer to finish than I had anticipated.

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Jun 27, 2017 Andy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Very good and enjoyable story. I think Fraser missed a trick by including all the anachronism for humor's sake. Without them, it still would have been great fun. ...more

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Sep 13, 2017 Ross Henderson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Hilarious and ridiculous piratical adventure, brings to mind the fantastic humour from The Princess Bride, with a bit of Douglas Adams' absurdity thrown in. ...more

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Dec 10, 2017 Angie Rhodes rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: owned

Funny, mad, pure escapism. Pirates of the Caribbean meet Monty Python.

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Mar 18, 2018 Bill Aitken rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Brilliant, as ever.

I've always been a fan of GMF. His style makes you wish you had known the man personally.

Read all of his works, say I, by the powers! ...more

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Apr 07, 2018 Michael Crowley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

George Macdonald Fraser had a wicked sense of humor as well as a fine eye for historical detail, and it's on full display here.

I loaned this to my best friend, and he gave the ultimate review of "The Pyrates" by saying that humanity had missed a golden opportunity by not locking William Goldman and Fraser in a room with a bottle of whisky and refusing to let them out until they'd produced the adventure novel of all adventure novels.

...more

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Apr 26, 2018 Stephen Robert Collins rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

From The author of the Raffles style anti hero Flashman comes The Jolly Rodger before Captain Sparrow this Port Royal style Yoho Hoo And A Bottle of Rum

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Jun 10, 2018 Shawn rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I'd say Fraser had a lot more fun writing this book than I had reading it. ...more

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What's the Name o...: SOLVED. Parody of a swashbuckling adventure story for adults [s]	15	458	Feb 11, 2017 04:21PM

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About George MacDonald Fraser

George MacDonald Fraser

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He is best known for his Flashman series of historical novels, purportedly written by Harry Flashman, a fictional coward and bully originally created by Thomas Hughes in Tom Brown's School Days. The novels are presented as "packets" of memoirs written by the nonagenarian Flashman, who looks back on his days as a hero of the British Army during the 19th century. The series begins with Flashman, and ...more