KÁRI GÍSLASON Running with Pirates. Reviewed by Ann Skea.

A mysterious man named the Pirate and the beautiful island of Corfu feature in this memoir from the author of The Sorrow Stone.

It is September 1990. Kári Gíslason and his friend Paul have been hitchhiking across Belgium, Germany, Austria, and Italy. They are now on a ferry approaching the island of Corfu, and they are down to their last twenty pence:

‘What can you get in Corfu for twenty pence?’

‘A packet of mints,’ I said.

We smiled at each other with an awareness of how exposed and dumb we were – and had been the whole way across Europe. Now, no money at all.

Faced with the prospect of accepting failure and calling their mothers for help, Paul suggests that they stop in Corfu and look for work. Both are travelling to get away from problems at home and they don’t yet want to go back, so they agree to be ‘runaways for a bit longer’.

In spite of their scruffy appearances, luck is on their side, and a middle-aged woman with a battered minibus, who has been unsuccessfully touting for customers for her camping site, takes pity on them.

‘Get in, then,’ she says after asking where they are from.

‘I’m the only one left and I can see you’ve got nowhere to go and nothing better. You might as well come with me. Face it.’

Deciding to trust her, the boys climb in and are driven for an hour into the hills of northern Corfu. Kári wonders if the woman, Helena, is a ‘beneficent witch’ who captures young men and spellbinds them, but he marvels at the landscape, the olive groves, the small, cramped villages they pass though, and the intense, impossible blues all around him. As an island, Corfu reminds him of Iceland, and he remembers his recent, unhappy, visit to Reykjavik to meet his father, hoping for some kind of acceptance, but his father remains hurtfully determined to keep Kári’s existence secret from his legitimate family there.

Part of this memoir reflects on this broken relationship and Gíslason’s lasting resolve to forge a good bond with his own sons. Chapters rich with vivid memories of his youthful freedom and his adventures in Corfu are interwoven with descriptions of his return to the island in 2022 with his wife and his two teenage boys. At that time, he was writing this book and wondering how he might ensure that his boys, Magnús and Finnur, could experience the same sort of freedom he had been given at their age.

Showing them a photograph of himself being driven recklessly though the hills in the open tray of a van, laughing and careless of the dangers, he wonders where all that carelessness goes as you get older:

‘You wouldn’t let us do it,’ says Magnús.

‘Well, you are a bit younger,’ I say.

Finnur joins is. ‘Only a year and a bit. Maybe you need some kind of therapy,’ he says jokingly. ‘Hasn’t some psychologist written a book on how to accept that your kids are going to do really stupid things, just like you did when you were young?’

Magnús senses a possible title. ‘Dad, you could call your book, Dumb Things to Do with Your Sons.’

Central to Kári’s and Paul’s lives on Corfu is ‘the Pirate’. Helena has told them that the Pirate, who owns a local tavern, will find work for them, and they can pay her for food and accommodation when they have a job. Their first meeting with this man, however, is unpropitious.

The Pirate’s head appeared while his body stayed behind the door, in the dark. ‘I’m not open,’ he said. ‘Fuck off.’

I put out my hand. ‘You must be the Pirate,’ I said.

He didn’t take it. ‘Did you hear me? I’m closed. Fuck off.’

Things don’t improve:

‘We came to see if you had any work. Jobs.’ I made digging and hammering actions with my hands to illustrate.

The Pirate’s expression didn’t change. ‘What are you doing that for?’ he asked wearily. ‘I know what work is. Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I can’t speak English? Are you stupid?’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘He is stupid,’ Paul said, trying to raise a laugh.

Still, the Pirate does find them work several times over the next few months. The jobs range from Kári’s day liming a cottage wall for an elderly woman and her daughter, who treats him like a son and insists on changing his worn-out shoes for a rather small pair of boots; to both Kári and Paul, plus an Austrian fellow-camper called Felix, ineptly carting and mixing concrete for a block of villas on Andreas’s farm, where they daily join the family for lunches of wine, meats, salads, feta and thick-sliced bread; then, finally, for the Pirate, living in a villa that the Pirate is building close to a rather scruffy beach that is, as yet, undiscovered by tourists.

Living at Helena’s campsite while they work, Kári strikes up a friendship with a rather strange girl called Michelle, who comes from Geneva and seems to have adopted a wandering way of life and, for the moment, to have fallen in love with Corfu. Michelle does not trust the Pirate, but will not say why. She avoids his tavern, but Kári and Paul begin to eat and drink there most nights and wonder at the changed man the Pirate seems when among his guests. In the mornings, he is distant, isolated, moody and morose. At night, ‘he was the Pirate, as witnessed by all – singer, cook, host … released from his earlier self and in complete control of the room’.

As he writes of his teenage life on Corfu, Gíslason captures the essence of the island and its people: the close small-village communities that tourists rarely discover, the generosity to strangers, and the charm and beauty of the place and the people. The Pirate, however, remains an enigma with a worrying, underlying, dark side. It is the final job offered to them by the Pirate, after the weather has changed and the locals have all left for warmer, drier places, that sounds so dangerous, and possibly piratical and illegal, that causes Kari to hurriedly leave the island, owing the Pirate a sum of money that, years later, before his final trip with his family, he returns to Corfu to repay.

Kári Gíslason writes beautifully and thoughtfully, and Running with Pirates is a rich and vivid tale of a period in his life when his experiences on Corfu not only shaped his view of the world but made him think carefully about the way he and his wife would bring up their sons. Musing on the changes that happen as children grow up and away from their parents, he thinks:

Now that they’re reaching the age I was when I first arrived in Corfu, they are also reaching the start of their own adventures and misadventures. The space between us expands. What if they’re dragged into piracy of some kind? Will they be let go, like I was?

His return to Corfu, and his retracing of his past along with his sons, is an important way of showing them something of his own youth and daring. Reviving memories of the Pirate also makes him newly aware of the acceptance, support and challenges this strange man had offered him and Paul. His ‘true debt’ to the Pirate, he comes to realise, is not the money he owed him when he left, but the Pirate’s easy acknowledgment that he needed to leave – the unquestioning goodwill with which he let him go. It was the Pirate’s capacity for seeing that ‘beyond the hapless free spirit who washed up onto his shore’, the ‘recklessness and naivety’, was someone trying to discover who he really was:

I was no pirate, no buccaneer. I was a son who wanted to become a father, and run with my own pirates, instead. The real Pirate saw that, and had no wish to hold me back.

Running with Pirates is not just a lively and interesting memoir, it is also Gíslason’s moving meditation on the sort of acceptance and generosity that he did not find in his own father, and that he now wants to share with his sons.

Kári Gíslason Running with Pirates University of Queensland Press 2024 PB 240pp $34.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

You can buy Running with Pirates from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

If you’d like to help keep the Newtown Review of Books a free and independent site for book reviews, please consider making a donation. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Tags: Corfu, fathers and sons, Kári | Gíslason, memoir, rites of passage, the Pirate