Review: The Pursuit of the Houseboat

The Pursuit of the Houseboat by John Kendrick Bangs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This second volume of Bangs' Hades stories has more plot than the first; the female immortals (notably Queen Elizabeth I, Cleopatra, Ophelia, Portia, Mrs Noah, Calpurnia the wife of Julius Caesar, and Xanthippe the wife of Socrates), having invaded the men's floating clubhouse, find it's being pirated by Captain Kidd. The men, led by Sherlock Holmes (who is a huge bluffer and sometimes fabricates his clues), attempt to track them down and get them back; Captain Kidd, who only wanted the boat and not the women, tries to figure out how to ditch them, and settles on tempting them with Paris fashions; and the women, though significantly distracted by fashion magazines, set out to rescue themselves, with some success.

Despite the fact that these are some of the greatest people who ever lived, much of the humour comes from them all being more or less incompetent. The author is wildly inconsistent on the question of whether the shades can be harmed or not, and if so by what, changing the answer depending on the demands of the plot and its humour. He's also inconsistent in that, in the first book, the shades talked about popping back to the mortal world as if it was extremely quick and easy, but here they have to take an extended sea voyage. While the first volume stuck mostly to real people, even if some of them had become fictionalized (such as Prince Hamlet), here we have several out-and-out fictional characters included in the cast: Holmes, several other fictional detectives better known at the time of writing than they are now, Portia, and Shylock, for example.

It's a short, light read, and amusing enough.

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