Book Review: We Are Pirates

Book: We Are Pirates

Author: Daniel Handler

Publisher: Bloomsbury Circus

Pages: 269

Rs: 499

When you are finished with Daniel Handler's We Are Pirates and your assumption of it being adolescent fiction – based on the image that Handler's Unfortunate Events series written under his nom de guerre Lemony Snicket has earned – is busted, you may struggle to place it in one of the two (subjective and vague) social constructs of 'good' or 'bad'.

But don't get worked up. Sometimes, the grey zone is a great place to be and, in a way, We Are Pirates lies in one. It's a classic Snicket laced generously with typical wry Handler wit.

Handler's omnipresent and unnamed narrator, the sutradhar of this book, is perhaps the most important character. His (or her?) uncanny sense of humour and sarcasm is remarkably similar to that of Handler-slash-Snicket, widening the appeal of this book across all age groups. We meet the three main characters through this narrator, whose constantly-switching perspectives make the narrative a bit choppy.

There's Phil Needle, a radio producer whose career is far from plain sailing; his 14-year-old girl Gwen who, like all teenagers, is bitten by the bug of rebellion; and, most important, the "American outlaw spirit", which drives Phil into thinking of interviewing a Blues musician from a bygone era to lift his career and makes Gwen shoplift and get caught.

Handler's slapstick is mostly unpredictable and enjoyable. Barring an instance or two – like the pun on "sunken chest" to compare pirate's treasure to a girl's anatomy, which seems out of context and forced – Handler does a nifty job of making waves with his unusual satire. Perhaps he is now aware more than ever that literature is a weapon of choice for firing one's thoughts freely, no matter how cheeky they get.

By distributing all his jibes among various characters, Handler injects a bit of himself in all of them to keep the funny quotient of the book up most of the time. Nonetheless, every character is distinct and this reasserts Handler's status as a prolific writer. With Phil, a no-getter whose personal and professional life is in the doldrums, Handler tries to diagnose all that ails the American family system. With Gwen, he deals with the more cosmopolitan problem of the existential angst that comes with adolescence. Through Errol, an Alzheimer's patient and a nutter – whose book collection inspires Gwen to become a pirate and plunder vessels in San Francisco Bay – Handler ridicules rather deftly the American society that's made forgetfulness its hallmark.
 

We Are Pirates is not polished stone. There are many instances that make it sail very close to the wind – like an improbable plot, ever-changing point of view and Handler's overdoing of sea and pirate imagery. All in all, it is a dark, funny and largely-entertaining book that may not linger in your mind long after you have read it. But then, it's not supposed to.