Long John Silver

Rich, old and almost alone, Long John Silver sits in Madagascan exile and broods on the past; both Jim Hawkins and Daniel Defoe tricked and libelled him and for once he is going to put the record straight while there is time. There is a price on his head and soon they will come to collect ... Larsson intelligently uses one of the most famous of fictional pirates as his mouthpiece in a book which tries to reconstruct the classic pirates of the Caribbean; mutiny followed by piracy was for many of them the only possible way out from the intolerable abuse of life on British ships. Silver has been an honest man and ended up shanghaied, and falsely accused of mutiny--if he becomes a monster and the account of what he does to the man who costs him his leg is pretty much emetic, how can his crimes weigh against the slavery and brutality from which supposedly good men profit? Larsson knows both the fictional and documentary record of the pirates of the Spanish Main; he makes particularly intelligent use of the biography of Captain England. He knows his stuff and, more importantly, he knows why he cares about it. --Roz Kaveney


Genre: Literary Fiction