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| Sunday, November 30, 2008 08:10 AM |
| Book Report - Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor |
 by Fëanor |
Poppy is a nice lady and has been getting out books she thinks I'll like at the library. One of her more recent hauls was three books containing the work of Mervyn Peake, the author of the Titus Groan novels (reviews of which you can find here). The first is a kind of puzzle book called Figures of Speech, which is just a series of illustrations, each of them meant to be a visualized representation of a particular figure of speech, with a key in the back. The illustrations are wonderful, but I'm afraid I was pretty terrible at puzzling out what saying they were each supposed to symbolize. The second book is Mervyn Peake: Writings & Drawings, which looks to be a collection of the author's work put together by his widow and an editor. I haven't had a chance to take a detailed look at this book yet; probably it'll get its own Book Report entry later on.
The third book, and the one I want to talk about briefly here, is a children's book published in 1939, written and illustrated by Peake, and entitled Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor. I call it a children's book because that's clearly what it's intended to be, although modern parents would probably think twice before reading it to their children. This is because Captain Slaughterboard is a pirate, and Peake does not shrink at all from describing just how dangerous and deadly a pirate he is. There's much talk of killing and death in the book, although none of it is actually illustrated, and there's certainly no blood and gore. The story is simple enough: the brutal, fearsome pirate Slaughterboard directs his crew to drop anchor near a strange island, and finding it populated by fantastic animals and monsters, he demands that they capture one for him. They do so, and Slaughterboard and the monster quickly become fast friends, eventually living happily ever after together on the island. The beautiful illustrations have a unique style to them, and are wonderfully imaginative and detailed. The island and its menagerie of amazing, oddly-named creatures reminds me of Lewis Carroll and Dr. Seuss. The writing is fun and silly, as is the story. Despite the talk of killing and death, the book is ultimately about friendship and learning to love life. It's now one of my favorite children's books of all time. It's full of fantasy, adventure, and joy, and I love it.
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