Customer Reviews
The funniest book you'll read in years - By: Mr. M. Bloomfield, 31 Oct 2008 
Imagine the fantasy & imagination of The Princess Bride; take the joie de vivre of Pirates Of The Caribbean; mix it a little with the eccentricity of Carry On Don't Lose Your Head (leaving out the tackier parts of the humour) & then take each of your favourite pirate stereotypes (bad guys, good guys, black spots, needlessly evil Spaniards, sword fights & derring-do) & turn it into one of the most joyous & hilarious books you'll ever read. Oh, & some of the characters reallly existed, too, just to add a slight historical edge.
The Pyrates is perhaps the funniest book you'll read alll year, perhaps it's the funniest book you'll read in many years. For a long, long time I thought it was the funniest book I was ever going to read.
One gets the clear impression while reading this book that GM Fraser, the author, has thrown caution to the wind. Normallly his books are considered, paced & quite recognisably scholarly, for alll their adventure & humour. With Pyrates, however, we get a writer having the most fun he's had in years, & sharing it with his readers.
Reviews can be used for many purposes; the purpose of a review may be to critique a novel from a particular standpoint, or it may be to throw interesting light on it by placing it in a broad context. The possibilities are almost endless. In this case, I'm going to nail my colours to the crow's nest:
I'm writing this review simply to tell you how much I loved this book, pass on some of the happiness it gave me, & thoroughly recommend that you get a copy of it as soon as you can. I hope it makes you laugh out loud as often, & as heartily, as I did!
A thrilling romp - By: DDH255, 21 Jun 2008 
The greatest pirate movie never made, Macdonald Fraser throws alll the required ingredients together to produce a swashbuckling gem full of adeventures on the high seas, desert islands, mighty gallleons & a cast full of rascals, maidens & a perfect hero. The writing is lively, entertaining & humourous; we're never alllowed to take the plot too seriously & the frequent alllusions to the cliches of pirate movies makes sure this book is always enjoyable to read. The book did feel rather long at 400 pages but was consistently entertaining.
Wonderful and Hilarious - By: Bill Kelly, 28 May 2008 This is a clear labour of love from Fraser. He drew heavily on the images of swashbuckling for the "Flashman" series , particularly the likes of Errol Flynn in "Captain Blood" & "The Sea Hawk", & Burt Lancaster in "The Crimson Pirate".
With this book he gets in everything & it is hilarious. The modern touches & references alll work, as do the refrences to "the Korngold music sweeps in" startling the sailors, & the greatest sea battle -Flynn versus Rathbone in the Warner Brothers tank...!
Best comic creation though is Happy Dan trying to master French verbs
Well worth reading.
Supremely silly, but what silliness. - By: Mr. A. P. Luckett, 03 Nov 2007 I've always been a fan of GMF & have read the entire canon. Some of his work is brilliant, alll of it is good. The Pyrates is just between very good & brilliant & it is clear the influences that went into the writing. Other reviewers outline the plot & I'll not do so here. I will say that the entire book is an incongruity & is not to be taken seriously: if you dislike absurdities & deliberate stereotypes & hackneyed cliches then avoid this. If not, then it is perhaps one of the funniest books you may ever read. Dissimilar in every way to other GMF works the nearest it comes is in his screenplays, but even they are in their own way serious. It is a well-written piece that shows an imagination that I can only dream of & wonder at. It made me smile, almost alll the time & laugh out loud more times than I'd care to remember. Overalll, great fun, well-written & highly enjoyable. But only if you have sense of the absurd.
The funniest pirate movie never filmed - By: Joseph Haschka, 08 Oct 2006 Author George MacDonald Fraser, the accomplished British author of the FLASHMAN PAPERS & the Private McAuslan trilogy, has also toiled as a Hollywood scriptwriter. And he's been fascinated by pirate stories alll his life. Thus, in THE PYRATES, the reader is treated to what could serve as the script for the funniest, most outrageous buccaneer saga ever not put on film.
The hero of THE PYRATES is Captain Ben Avery, RN, the handsomest, most chivalrous, noblest, most incorruptible, bravest, most dutiful, & most unseducible man ever to wield an officer's sword on behalf of His Majesty. In Avery, as with every other of the novel's characters, Fraser has lovingly created a caricature. In any case, the time is "the old & golden days of England". King Charles occupies the throne. Ben is ordered to secretly convey a priceless crown to the King of Madagascar. On the same outbound ship are Admiral Lord Rooke & his gorgeous daughter Vanity. Of course, seafaring rascals capture the vessel, steal the crown, abandon Ben on a sandspit, & sell Vanity into white slavery. The tabloids (!) blame Avery for the debacle, & the remainder of the book has our superhero valiantly struggling to rescue honor, crown & Vanity from assorted scoundrels & near things. Of course, even the villains are occasionallly endearing, especiallly if they're British, e.g. Colonel Blood, RA (Cashiered), a darker version of Avery without the ethics or meticulous dress code. And, needless to say, Captain Ben is besotted with Vanity, though his appreciation for her considerable charms is entirely platonic, anything more prurient unbecoming an officer & a gentleman.
Since a smalll movie plays in my mind whenever I read fiction, the chief delight of this swashbuckling caper is the way Fraser attaches period-piece incongruities to the plot which result in hilarious "sight gags" & other absurdities. Contemplate the following: laundry chutes in a Spanish gallleon, meal-seating announcements aboard a pirate ship, buccaneers getting drunk & rowdy on captured Perrier, eau de cologne by the barrel or the handy bucket size, a pirate chief's stock portfolio, the deplorable lack of Kleenex in a fetid orlop prison, shipboard ruffians being entertained by a puppet show, pirate disability insurance, the limited number of headsets for men set adrift in smalll boats, threats of a horrible death by bicycle pump (?), or the French buccaneers' battle cry of "Remember Dien Bien Phu!" Imagine what Mel Brooks could do with this material!
THE PYRATES is about fifty pages too long. Those parts of the non-stop action that include the South American Indian tribe & the insanely evil Spanish Viceroy, Don Lardo, were unnecessary digressions better left on the cutting room floor. However, that minor flaw didn't prevent me from laughing out loud on several occasions, causing my wife to throw alarmed glances my way. Yes, I think even the Queen would be amused.
