Pirate Talk or Mermalade

Put aside any expectations of swashbuckling that this title might inspire. Pirate Talk or Mermalade has its share of cutlasses, of peg legs, of sailors marooned on desert isles. But it is far from a typical pirate tale. Described as a “novel in voices,” the story is told entirely in dialogue. No quotation marks, no helpful tag lines (i.e. he said, she replied): each page is simply the conversation, with an indentation serving as the indication that the speaker has shifted. At first, I thought the “only dialogue” rule would limit the scope—where would the description be? The thought and reflection?—but within a few pages, it was apparent that Svoboda is a masterful writer and is no more constrained by this selection of form than a poet is constrained by composing a sonnet: the novel delights because of this rule, succeeds because of this confinement.

Put aside any expectations of swashbuckling that this title might inspire. Pirate Talk or Mermalade has its share of cutlasses, of peg legs, of sailors marooned on desert isles. But it is far from a typical pirate tale. Described as a “novel in voices,” the story is told entirely in dialogue. No quotation marks, no helpful tag lines (i.e. he said, she replied): each page is simply the conversation, with an indentation serving as the indication that the speaker has shifted. At first, I thought the “only dialogue” rule would limit the scope—where would the description be? The thought and reflection?—but within a few pages, it was apparent that Svoboda is a masterful writer and is no more constrained by this selection of form than a poet is constrained by composing a sonnet: the novel delights because of this rule, succeeds because of this confinement.

Pirate Talk or Mermalade tells the story of two brothers who, following the death of their mother, set out for sea. They end up as pirates of a sort, somewhat willingly and somewhat unwillingly. One suffers disfiguration of a ridiculously stereotypical sort (loss of a leg, of an eye, and of a hand, which means he has a peg leg, a patch and a hook). The other is routinely visited by a mermaid who urges him to join her in the water. Both end up shipwrecked on an island, imprisoned aboard a slaver, and, eventually, on a mission in the Arctic. Seems plain enough. But the tale twists and curls away, resisting simple categorization and description.

What could be a straight-forward story of adventure on the high seas is made into much more by Svoboda. In part, this is done through her language. She enjoys the tangle of good word play, as when the brothers are given an order: “take the watch whilst I have a hand of whist, and wait.” But it’s not all alliteration and tongue-twisters. She crafts sentences of such intensity that they easily overcome the limitations one might expect of an all-dialogue novel. For instance, one of the brothers tells another a story as they suffer in isolation on an island, a story about “this beautiful fish with watery fins and skin the color of ruby beaches at sunset the boy befriends.” Fluid and descriptive, Svoboda’s prose easily crosses the line to poetry as in this exchange:

I saw—

You must tell me.

Mark the spot—

What did you see?

The sea, I saw the sea. And—

And?

You, a she, the sea—

Did you see her?

I saw—sister—I saw—

I will mark the spot, I will. What did you see?

Aye, the sea.

For all the wordplay and cleverly crafted sentences, Svoboda’s writing is not just about the surface. It does more than sound good. Just as the story itself transcends the normal bounds of an adventure tale, so too the themes are oddly morphed into new shapes. As the one brother suffers injury upon injury, he remarks, “Pirates are a perfect picture of a person piecemeal, falling apart.” In this and other such lines, it is clear that the story aims to comment on self, on identity, and on how what we hold to be icons—those we think of as rebels, heroes, or whores—are often not so easily defined as their singular appearance would make us believe.

Beyond the brothers and their redefinition of piracy, the mermaid is the character most compelling in this novel. When she is fished out by one brother, the interaction at first seems to go according to expectations:

I’m sorry to catch you.

I’m glad to be caught. When I saw it was your hook, I rejoiced. Just wrench out the barb…

There.

That’s better…

This fishy part is new and shocking.

Not so new. The skirts all women wear to confound men hid it.

Soon enough, though, it becomes clear that this is not the typical mermaid-woos-sailor type of story. Whenever the mermaid appears to the brother, she tempts him to join her. But what at first seems like a “come, run away with me” invitation takes on ominous undertones, such as when she invites him to swim with her and he replies: “Dust to dust, as the church says, not water to water.” Svoboda patiently unfolds the mermaid-as-death metaphor over the course of the novel, and it is this piece that I found most satisfying. This alluring, promising presence, always lurking near the sailor’s shoulders, the mermaid is the glue that holds the pieces of this story together.

Pirate Talk and Mermalade is immediately engaging, with prose that is breath-taking yet easy to read. Short and deft, I devoured this novel, and expect that many others will enjoy doing the same.