Flying Dutch

Holt's books are generally a fun read, and this one for my money is the best of the bunch. The cover tells it all, so I won't go into the details. Suspend your disbelief and enjoy yourself!

It's Tom Holt at the top of his form: funny, literate, and equally at home in any of five or six recent centuries. That's a good thing, since that's what it takes to trace Cornelius Vandervecker from the fifteen-hundreds on, sailing forever across the loneliest wastes of the seven seas. Yes, Cornelius is the Flying Dutchman. No, he's no myth. And no, he's not exactly cursed - well, not as such. It's more of a blessing, really, if you allow blessings of the mixed sort. There was an incident involving an alchemist, a hasty retreat from a suddenly-unfriendly shore, and an untested elixir of eternal life. And alcohol, lots of alochol. (Well, everything around Vandervecker seems to involve alcohol.) That elixir just happened to work, but has a teeny little side effect - a personal pong that would knock a buzzard off a dungwagon. On the whole, it's a good idea to put a few thousand miles between the crew and anyone with a normal sense of smell. There's that alchemist, though, who's still trying to fix that little problem. There's also Danny Bennett, an enthusiastic journalist with a nose for news, and whatever else it is that surrounds the Flying Dutchman. And there's also this little matter of Vandervecker's long-term investments - I mean, very long term. Flying Dutch is a good bit of amusement, filled with characters from the nearly inert to the flamboyant, from the witless crew to the scheming Montalban. The story keeps its pace right to the end. If you've never read Holt before, this is a great place to start. If you're tired of waiting for Pratchett's next, it's a great place to stop. If you've read Holt before, it's a great way to carry on. Go ahead, be part of the goings-on, they're huge fun. //wiredweird

I loved this book. Tom Holt is a wordsmith, a genuine magician. This is British humor at it's best. It's odd that British television and movie comedy is mind-numbingly stupid (excepting Fawlty Towers and some of Monty Python of course), but that the very best humorous writing comes from the U.K. Tom Holt tackles the 'Flying Dutchman' myth, that an old Dutch seaman is cursed to sail the seas forever. Holt tells us how Wagner got it a tad wrong. In actuality the seaman drank an immortality elixir. Hilarious stuff. I love reading about Sebastian, the seaman who keeps jumping from the crow's nest to kill himself. This ranks among the best books I've ever read, up there with Douglas Adams, Stephen Donaldson, & Tolkien. I recommend this for everyone.

I found this to be one of Holt's better novels. He doesn't give in to the temptation to be totally flippant, as he sometimes does in his later novels; out of the three published in the U.S., I think this is definitely the best. You still might want to look into importing some of his other books (he's really quite prolific).

Although I subsequently read and was a bit disappointed by Tom Holt's other books, Flying Dutch was one of the best books I have ever read. "Hitchhiker" fans will find the same absurdities, wild use of language, cynicism, and underlying frustration with the universe that Adams conveys. I have been looking for it for awhile & am sorry to find it's not readily available