Yo Ho Ho

I've been stuck into John Drake's Flint and Silver, which comes out in July from Harper, after being given a proof the other day. It's a prequel to Treasure Island, about how Long John Silver first became a pirate, how there came to put the buried treasure on Treasure Island.

It is difficult to try to copy one of the giants of literature - Stevenson himself wrote an essay 'The Sedulous Ape' about how writers copy great writers to try to find their own styles - still more difficult to take his characters. On one level, it doesn't work at all. You are constantly comparing this to Treasure Island and, fun as it is, Flint and Silver won't be an enduring work of great literature.

But, blow me mateys, it is fun. To fully disclose, I'm a sucker for most books that have sailing ships, muskets and breeches (I myself look damn good in breeches, let me tell you). The characterisation is coarse and Drake seems not to have heard the 'show don't tell' rule of writing. But the plot whips along, Flint is a villain you love to hate and I missed my bus stop because I was so engrossed in reading it on the way home today. I ended up in Peckham - scary.

You can't really fault Harper for it, but there is more than a whiff of Pirates of the Caribbean opportunism. The cover art looks so close to Johnny Depp I wonder his agent doesn't ask for an image rights fee.

This reminds me, a few months ago I read Alberto Manguel's brilliant novella Stevenson Under the Palm Trees about RLS's dying days in Samoa. Manguel has RLS meeting a psychotic Scottish man named Baker who I guess is Stevenson's dark side, a man acting out horrible things that RLS as a writer only imagines.

The final scene in the book gave me nightmares for some time and still disturbs. Stevenson, straining to open a bottle of wine is struck by the cerebral hemorrhage that kills him. His dying words to his wife, standing nearby, are 'My face, is it changed?' I don't know why that creeps me out so - maybe something about this great mind trapped in this failing body (he was tubercular and died at 44). Ultimately we're all trapped in these failing bodies, all our faces will change and decay and rot. Stevenson's maybe just went a lot quicker than most of ours will.