Customer Reviews

Flying Dutch (A Thomas Dunne Book)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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

The book was a good read and fun. Author made great characters and some great situations and commentary on society. Sometimes it lagged though in moving the story along. Overall I liked reading it but would not call it a must rea

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).

Jan Vanderdecker is the Flying Dutchman. He has been alive since 1553. He is not real happy about it. His crew is not real happy either (one of them keeps trying to kill himself by jumping out of the crows nest ten or 15 times/day). The problem with living so long is that you leave a paper trail. Enter Jane Doland, CPA, who makes her living following paper trails. She has discovered that someone still has an open account in a bank her CPA firm audits. What follows is the funniest book I have read in years. The reason everyone in financial community should be frightened of the Flying Dutchman is silly. The reason the crew of the Verdomde can only visit land once every seven years is absurd. The possibility that the members of the crew could live over 400 years and still be idiots is somewhat disturbing. Humor is rare in the fantasy genre. There were more laughs/page than I have seen any any humor book I have read.

SPOILERS AHEAD. Not major ones, but some plot points will be revealed that you might not want to know now. Be Advised.

I really give this book 3 and a half stars. I liked it, but not as much as I had hoped.
To be sure, this retelling of The Flying Dutchman legend has its moments. I highlighted a number of passages that made me laugh out loud.

but the book took too many words to get to the point, and all of them weren't that interesting or necessary.

It may speak more to my haphazard reading style lately than to anything else, but I found some of the characters to be confusing. Not the situations the characters were in, but more of a "now....who is that, again?" About halfway into the book, two new characters showed up without any real introduction. After that rude interruption, one of them stays there and develops a story line. It's not a great storyline. Then the rude guy keeps dragging in more people! (I admit, it's hilarious that the guy is being held at gunpoint by his own boss, because he's never seen the man and doesn't know his name. This was not a funny enough moment to justify either of them showing up in the book.)

Less than halfway into the book, a character who's been introduced in the first chapter gets a fascinating assignment, then completely disappears. We never see or hear from him again. I think his story would have been more interesting (in an accounting kind of way) than the guy who just showed up at a regatta in the middle. There could have been more conflict with the original people in the story, is the point I'm trying to convey. I didn't have much sympathy at all for the David character. But maybe I'm wrong, and David shows up in other books. I hope he does, in fact, otherwise he's just a random stranger who showed up here.

But, I liked Julius Van Der Decker, and the cat, and the insane crew of the Verdomde. I loved Jane, and completely sympathized with her. I even like Montalban. I thought his accidental inventions in trying to solve his own issue should have gotten a LOT more stage time.

Overall, not a bad read for a rainy January. At least this one will make you laugh.

"Flying Dutch" is the first of Tom Holt's books that I've read. I'm pretty impressed. His writing is very much in the style of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (clever dialog and storylines that nicely interconnect). Most of the book exudes the care Holt took to mesh everything together. Unfortunately, the last quarter of the book feels a bit rushed: people don't stay in character, a main storyline and character appear without earlier preparation, and a sort of "then a miracle occurs" tie-up. But, the book is written well enough that this "lesser writing" is still acceptable and the book as a whole is clever, interesting, and fun to read. So, overall, I recommend it and rate it at a Very Good 4 stars out of 5.

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