Living with Water

Pirate Talk or Mermalade by Terese Svoboda is a novel that consists of dialogue only, mostly between two brothers who become pirates, take to the seas, are attacked and shipwrecked, and end up in the Arctic. Their mother is around, but not for long. An additional character, the Mermaid, speaks with them at irregular intervals. Other characters, such as Cap'n Peters, exist only within the brothers' conversations. The only other characters who speak are a French pirate and a parrot.

The premise of this mermaid/pirate book intrigues me: is it possible to tell a story entirely in dialogue? Turns out the answer is yes, though the story being read might not be the same story the characters believe they tell, or the same one the mermaid thinks she is trapped in, and so on—which begs the question, just because it can be done, does that mean it's a good idea?

A great many things that seem like good ideas aren't, such as, to steal an example from the book, trying to make soup out of rope or, to borrow another example, stealing a whale's eye. Or, yet another example, killing oneself with a rope covered in mussel shells. As an aside, any book that invokes rope, whales, and ships so regularly surely must be alluding to Moby-Dick (1851), though the whales are mostly dead and rope seems little more than a prime ingredient for soup.

Not that the book doesn't entertain, because it does. What with the parrot and the peg leg and the mermaid and the brother who might be a sister. Perhaps pirates are always confused, and the absence of exposition (because, truly, who can explain pirates? Or mermaids?) seeks to recreate the world of the book between the reader and the page. And I'm a big fan of confusion, having been confused most of my life.

Surely some confusion is beneficial while too much is not, but how to achieve the balance? Parts of this book strike a balance, though overall what I came away from the book with is an overwhelming desire not to eat rope soup or to be a pirate or to spend any time at all on a ship, since they seem to be attacked with alarming regularity. And it made me wonder, how do babies breathe underwater? Or maybe just a certain baby, who might be half-mermaid or maybe all mermaid; really, it's unclear.

One of the benefits of the all-dialogue novel is that many things must be skipped over, so that when, for example, it turns out the sister/brother gave birth to a baby and threw it overboard, the reason we, the readers, don't know about it is because it was never spoken about. Of course.

As a fan of Arctic exploration, I couldn't help but be drawn to the final section of the book, "1728 Arctic Spring." The poor pirates are not only ship-wrecked, as they have been for most of the book, but now they are mostly frozen and wandering, as many explorers do, in the snow and the cold. The mermaid reappears, of course, and one brother sees her ("You, a she, the sea—").

Svoboda is a poet as well as a prose writer, and she demonstrates her facility with language regularly. Much of the dialogue has the quality of poetry about it, as in "In the beginning, everyone lived beside water." Another example, "Aye, water is the point of all this." Perhaps this last bit explains the flow of dialogue in this book, not in service of conveying a story but in order to demonstrate movement.

This book reminds me of what the poet Lynn Emanuel says about prose writing in "The Politics of Narrative: Why I Am A Poet." She proclaims, "In poetry you just give the instructions to the reader and say, 'Reader, you go on from here.'" The prose writer, on the other hand, "spends pages and pages on some fat book where everything...