Book Review – The Adventures of Chas From Tas

Avast me hearties…

Caution – strong language plus…

(Aww fuck it, I can’t be bothered with the warning)

I finally got my hands on a copy of my old mate Chas from Tas’ book, hot off the presses and I wrote this after reading the first Chapter last night. Reviewers really should finish the book, but…

“Tears. Laughter. Awe.

I have finally, irrevocably, inevitably and satisfyingly got hold of a copy of “The Adventures of Chas from Tas” by Charles Blundell and Juliet Prentice, newly released and available for purchase at the link below, I have been consumed for the past 40 minutes with the first 26 pages. I have had to stop reading in tears a number of times and have been overwhelmed by raucous and uncontrollable laughter so much that several of my neighbours have pounded on the floor and walls and ceiling and I think I have heard sirens on the street, but I couldn’t tell because I was laughing and crying at the same time.

And this is only Chapter One.

I have known (ever since I read an early 1980s article Chas published in Asian Fishing Monthly – sorry BMax) about dodging typhoons in the Pacific on the way to his first landing in HK in 1982, that my wizened, decrepit, barnacle encrusted, often drunkenly incomprehensible old pal could write.

But I didn’t know really until this evening. What he and Juliet have accomplished is mind blowing. The book is a masterpiece.

I am not sure I can take more tonight. I’ll go as hard and long as I can, as hard as the gimlet blue eyes of the Asinara Falcon and as long as the Afghan Hound Shibumi’s turds. As long and hard as Chas was in the shower with the Owner’s Daughter on his first sailing job.

This book is not really a sailing memoir, this is f***ing literature (my late sainted English teacher mother would agree) and I am jealous of the power and scope of the writing and the beauty of the prose which my often (on land anyway) cataclysmically comatose old bud has produced with Juliet’s magic and guidance.

I’m gobsmacked. I knew it was going to be good but I didn’t realise it was going to be fodder for University level English courses for a hundred years.

Hemingway, London, Steinbeck, Twain you all have nothing on Chas and Fruity. Maties, the power and beauty, the simplicity and clear cold steely blue icy sharpness of your writing has blown me away.

I am awed by what I have read so far. Awed. I love it and am proud, proud, proud to have helped in a small way. I look forward to a ride on Chas’ Gulfstream Five as his bodyguard when he goes to Burbank for the Tonight Show in three years’ time. (Not kidding).

I am going to take a break for now, because I can’t deal with it anymore. I need to go out and have a smoke and consider my own inadequacy as a writer,

This book is going to the top of the New York Times list and will sell 100 Million copies. At least.

You can order your copy at the link below (and do it damn fast as the price has gone up once already and is bound to climb more) or if you are in HK you will be able to get it from me very soon. Like Monday I hope. And somewhat cheaper.

Chas you beauty, I knew it would be good but f*** me mate, I wish you had warned me harder. And Fruity m’dear, I didn’t realise that Muses actually existed. What you have done for my old mate is simply outstanding, astounding and astonishing.

https://www.facebook.com/chasfromTas/?fref=ts”

Here’s an excerpt:

The book is awesome.