THE PIRATE QUEEN, by Ariel Lawhon
After “Odyssey” fever this summer and the ongoing discourse about shiny muscular hero tales, it was a relief and a delight to plunge headfirst into the intrepid world of Grace O’Malley, the fiery protagonist at the center of Ariel Lawhon’s sixth historical novel, “The Pirate Queen.”
As Lawhon explains in her acknowledgments, she didn’t find the story of the 16th-century Irish pirate queen; the story found her. She learned about Grace — or Gráinne Ní Mháille, in Gaelic — via a fellow writer, and quickly recognized that this woman was often left in the margins of history. Through exhaustive research and an expansive imagination, Lawhon revives her, crafting an eventful narrative brimming with the sea captain’s exploits, adventures, battles and romances.
At the beginning of the novel, the reader meets 5-year-old Grace, or “bird” as she’s called by her chieftain father, brazenly slicing off her long braid as one of her first acts of rebellion. Quickly we learn that Grace, even as a child, is “tenacious. Half wild. And prettier than she ought to be” with “a finality about her, like this is the face she is destined to wear, it only has to catch up with who she will be in the end.” (Similar to Maggie O’Farrell’s “Hamnet,” the book uses the present tense, which brings a contemporary immediacy as well as increased velocity to the story, drawing the reader closer to this bygone world.)
Rather than unspooling the story of Grace’s life with an episodic chronological approach, Lawhon borrows inspiration from the shape of the Triquetra, or Trinity Knot. The Celtic symbol’s trio of curves often represent the three stages of womanhood — Maiden, Mother and Matriarch — and Lawhon mirrors this approach for her novel’s structure, moving between these distinct phases of Grace’s life in alternating chapters.
Admittedly, it takes a little time to settle into the rhythm of the narrative, particularly with the vast cast of characters populating this saga (the character list at the front introduces 56 people, several of whom have the same name). Given the action-packed plot, it was challenging to hold the three timelines in my head and recall the thread that Lawhon was picking up with each chapter. That said, the author often offers thematic hinges between the chapters, producing a subtle call and response in the story. The recurring chapter subheads and family tree at the end of the novel also provide further footing.
Surprisingly, this narrative strategy shapes the storytelling in compelling ways. Primarily, it allows for the reader to experience the full evolution of Grace from birth to death in all of her glory — her early days of defiance and the development of the Sense (the ability to speak to the Irish sea god and feel the moods of the sea), the entrapment of her first marriage to Donal O’Flaherty at age 16, her pregnancies and the birth of her respective children, and then her later years as she enacts revenge and settles scores with others. With each chapter, this braided approach provides a kaleidoscopic portrayal of Grace O’Malley.
Throughout this epic novel, not all of Lawhon’s characters come to life: Some of the male characters verge on cartoonish villains, such as Grace’s first husband and her nemesis, Richard Bingham. This is disappointing, given the richness of Grace and her loyal crew of followers (Ultan, Gutty and the Murray twins). In addition, some of the romantic scenes between Grace and her lifelong love, Richard Bourke, teeter into cliché-heavy prose that disrupts the enchanting spell of the novel. (“Richard kisses her,” the author writes. “Hard and fast. Then slow and sweet, his tongue tasting and savoring. He takes his time coaxing her surrender. … And then they are one, united in body and soul.”)
The story is far more engaging when the author animates Grace amid the enduring Irish-scapes — both land and sea. “The wide expanse of the North Atlantic Ocean stretches before them,” Lawhon writes during one of Grace’s journeys. “Above them is only sky, pricked by stars and a stingy moon, shrunken to a thin sliver. Light is sparse, but still the ocean glitters and rolls in the distance. Dark above and dark below, broken only by a stretch of white sand that splits the darkness in half.”
Taken altogether, this propulsive 500-page book delivers a spirited, layered feminist historical chronicle of one woman who resists convention every step of the way. Toward the end of the novel, Lawhon writes: “Today Grace feels as though she is every version of herself. Still the young girl running barefoot in the waves. The mother fighting for her children. And the old woman, wistful at the end of a long, vibrant life. Today the matriarch sits with the maiden and the mother, and she feels the braid of her life woven together, like a living story. A legend.”
A braid, a life, a legend — and so much more.
THE PIRATE QUEEN | By Ariel Lawhon | Doubleday | 503 pp. | $32
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