1949 children's fantasy. Timothy and Hew live on Popinsay Island with
their father, a retired naval captain, and help look for the pirate
ship reputed to have been wrecked nearby. But soon they will get
involved in larger adventures…
It's whimsical, and mostly in a good way. All the drowned sailors
live on eternally under the sea. Davy Jones is in charge of the good
ones, and the bad ones are the pirates. Most sea creatures are at
least a bit intelligent, and some can take sides; humans travel by
whale-howdah. The pirates' dastardly plan is to replace the knots that
join the parallels of latitude and longitude together (and thus hold
the continents in place) with their own better knots, and everyone
else agrees that this would be a Bad Thing in some way never clearly
specified.
It's charming, and often delightful, and occasionally funny (though
quite often in a cruel way). There's a through-line plot (mostly) but
really it's more of a picaresque, an excuse to meet the people,
creatures and places under the sea; there's not a great deal of
suspense or rising tension. There's very little more to the story than
is immediately apparent, though, and it should certainly be approached
in a child's mind-set rather than as something written to appeal to
adults as well.
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