![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This year, what with one house being renovated, one being sold, and a storage unit being cleared out, most of the books of my childhood have passed under my eyes (except for the library books, of course, which were countless). Of the ones I kept or requested be kept, I'm so far happiest to have the Margaret Mahys, this one and The Chewing Gum Rescue and other stories. As well as having the copies, we listened to them on audiotape over and over; here and there I can still hear the voice of the tape coming through behind the words (and, since I've been reading this one aloud to Charlotte, I sometimes use it). The Pirate's Mixed-Up Voyage is only a hundred and sixty pages long, but the old relative scale comes back to me: I was only five. Each chapter bellies out with as much time as I could imagine for it.
Between the last time I read The Pirate's Mixed-Up Voyage and now I've thought of it as one of those impossibly complex puzzle stories like Dirk Gently, except woven for children. It starts with a man named Lionel Wafer ("...who was as hairy as he was handsome and as handsome as he was hairy...") who gets tired of working in a mere pirate-themed tea shop, and decides to go off and be a real pirate instead. He and his crew are sure they're headed for a simple, heroic life, free from the tedium of income tax returns and regular employment. They sail off across the Seven Seas in the direction of the Thousand Islands,* intent on filching the diamond doorknob of millionaire inventor Humbert Cash-Cash -- with only their parrot, a staunch determinist who does not believe in the simple life, as a dissenting voice.
The plot which proves the parrot right involves encyclopedia-salesmen, love at first sight, genuinely comic songs, witches, a confusion of lookalikes, a school for villains, amnesia, orphans, jigsaw puzzles, a detective inspector, quantities of long-lost family members, and gingerbread so hot it can cure frostbite in arctic explorers. (This last is the reason I started making gingerbread as a child, and it is the reason I put so very much ginger and chilli powder into that gingerbread, and to anyone who had to eat it, I apologise). When I was a child the plot played straight, and seeing it all come together was gloriously exciting in the Dirk Gently way; it's good I can remember that, because now, reading aloud the scene in which all remaining loose threads are knotted, I kept having to pause because I couldn't stop laughing. I don't know if I've ever seen more coincidences used in one story.
And Mahy has such linguistic fun. ("Listen, you psitticotic critic!" shouts the captain to the parrot). In the others of her books I've read recently I always feel as though there are words loose, words shaken out of place -- although it scarcely matters. But here everything's exactly shipshape -- the shape of the ship in the book, whose whole deck is covered in bolted-down tea tables because none of the pirates brought a spanner.
*[footnote from the book itself]: "The Thousand Islands mentioned here are not the Thousand Islands of the St Lawrence River, Canada, but a totally different Thousand Islands never mentioned in geography books, so as to avoid confusion."
Between the last time I read The Pirate's Mixed-Up Voyage and now I've thought of it as one of those impossibly complex puzzle stories like Dirk Gently, except woven for children. It starts with a man named Lionel Wafer ("...who was as hairy as he was handsome and as handsome as he was hairy...") who gets tired of working in a mere pirate-themed tea shop, and decides to go off and be a real pirate instead. He and his crew are sure they're headed for a simple, heroic life, free from the tedium of income tax returns and regular employment. They sail off across the Seven Seas in the direction of the Thousand Islands,* intent on filching the diamond doorknob of millionaire inventor Humbert Cash-Cash -- with only their parrot, a staunch determinist who does not believe in the simple life, as a dissenting voice.
The plot which proves the parrot right involves encyclopedia-salesmen, love at first sight, genuinely comic songs, witches, a confusion of lookalikes, a school for villains, amnesia, orphans, jigsaw puzzles, a detective inspector, quantities of long-lost family members, and gingerbread so hot it can cure frostbite in arctic explorers. (This last is the reason I started making gingerbread as a child, and it is the reason I put so very much ginger and chilli powder into that gingerbread, and to anyone who had to eat it, I apologise). When I was a child the plot played straight, and seeing it all come together was gloriously exciting in the Dirk Gently way; it's good I can remember that, because now, reading aloud the scene in which all remaining loose threads are knotted, I kept having to pause because I couldn't stop laughing. I don't know if I've ever seen more coincidences used in one story.
And Mahy has such linguistic fun. ("Listen, you psitticotic critic!" shouts the captain to the parrot). In the others of her books I've read recently I always feel as though there are words loose, words shaken out of place -- although it scarcely matters. But here everything's exactly shipshape -- the shape of the ship in the book, whose whole deck is covered in bolted-down tea tables because none of the pirates brought a spanner.
*[footnote from the book itself]: "The Thousand Islands mentioned here are not the Thousand Islands of the St Lawrence River, Canada, but a totally different Thousand Islands never mentioned in geography books, so as to avoid confusion."
