How Kari Gislason fell into the clutches of the Pirate - and survived
By Susan Johnson
For anyone lucky enough to have lived on a Greek island when they were young, the experience lives on inside you, a joy that only grows more radiant with time. Of course, many remember with happiness the feeling of being young, but being young in Greece delivers a very particular slice of heaven.
What is it about Greece? “That’s one of the things I was trying to figure out in the book,” says the Brisbane-based literature professor and author Kári Gíslason of his new memoir, Running With Pirates.
Kari Gislason and his two sons peer into the taverna once owned by the Pirate.
His misadventures as an 18-year-old stranded on the Ionian island of Corfu is intertwined with the story of taking his two teenage sons back 25 years later and becomes a deeply moving meditation on what it means to release our children into adulthood. In 1990 Gíslason was on the cusp of adulthood himself, on a gap year before starting an arts/law degree at the University of Queensland: it was the thrilling start of the rest of his life.
The Pirate in his tavernaCredit: Kari Gislason
“Why did it affect me so much? Well, it was partly to do with where I was coming from at the time — from Iceland, a little heartbroken after meeting my father, broke, a bit depressed — and it felt as if I’d arrived in another world, a whole world of its own. There’s something about the Greek landscape that many other writers have experienced and written about; there’s an intensity to life in Greece, some wild, unbounded quality.”
Gíslason could not believe the intensity of the colours: “The sky, the sea — it’s exactly as Lawrence Durrell says, ‘where the blue really begins’ — and then there was the smell of the pine groves, and the food! I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy in my life eating simple food. The Greeks are an almost unfathomably kind people, with a rare openness to strangers. Everything about Greece seemed to fit around me.”
Kari Gislason in Corfu in 1990.
If Gíslason, now 51, speaks of that long-ago autumn as being infused with a strange, poetic beauty, it’s not only because “memory can be over-generous towards the past, imbuing it with magical memories”. It’s also because there was a genuine strangeness to the proceedings: two boys, hitchhiking across Europe, turning up on Corfu with 27p (51c) between them, like penniless travellers in a myth.
One boy (that would be Gíslason) finding work with a shoe cobbler, who presents him with a gift of boots several sizes too small, then both become indebted to a man who may or may not be a pirate, a smuggler of drugs or guns.
The tavern owner known to everyone locally as “the Pirate” also sings ballads of heartbreak and longing and offers kindness, friendship and practical help to Gíslason and his mate, Paul, a chancer from Glasgow (with whom Gíslason has now lost touch).
For Gíslason in particular — son of a single mother and “fatherless” boy who had just met his Icelandic father as an adult for the first time, only to find that his father did not wish to be part of Gíslason’s life — the Pirate represents a kind of welcoming father figure, a buried wish for reclamation.
But, like his own father, Gíslason is never sure if he can trust him: one day he watches the Pirate mercilessly slaughter a pig and, as winter sets in, labouring work dries up and the boys become increasingly financially indebted to him. Like enchanted servants, Gíslason and Paul rely on the Pirate for food and shelter and eventually end up owing him 8000 drachma (about $80, not a huge amount, but a large enough sum for 1990).
Because there is no work on the island in winter, the boys have no way of paying the money back, except by working as crew on the Pirate’s boat, due to sail within weeks from Athens to Brazil. The Pirate isn’t saying what cargo the ship will be transporting, and also informs them that the one rule of life at sea is that if you don’t get on with the other crew, you will be pushed overboard into Poseidon’s murky depths.
It’s a story ready-made to thrill children, which is exactly what happens after Gíslason returns to safety and begins “proper” adulthood, experiencing “the full catastrophe” as the great Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis puts it in Zorba, The Greek: marriage, a house, children. Aged 31, after a few more years of study and more travel and a newly acquired PhD on authorship in medieval Iceland under his belt, he marries a fellow Queenslander, Olanda, and two sons are born – Finnur in 2006, and Magnus, in 2008.
The boys grow up hearing stories about the Pirate and when the family returns to Corfu in 2022, it becomes a form of reckoning, and Running With Pirates the triumphant result.
Kari Gislason says he’d been waiting for fatherhood all his life.Credit: Nicholas Martin
This is not Gíslason’s first rodeo: he’s written about family before, specifically his relationship with his father, who was a married man with another family, in his 2011 memoir The Promise of Iceland. He’s best known for the projects he undertook with the ABC broadcaster Richard Fidler, when the pair travelled to Iceland, exploring both Gíslason’s family story and tales of ancient Vikings for a popular Radio National documentary, which went on to become 2017’s best-selling book Saga Land: The Island of Stories at the Edge of the World.
Gíslason’s own wanderlust originated with his adventurous mother, Susan, now 83, who migrated to Australia with her English family as a teenager. After a brief first marriage, her response to heartbreak was to travel to Japan and then cross Russia on her own, to travel to the end of the world to discover in Iceland a country she loved. She ended up falling in love not only with Iceland, but with one Icelander in particular and, in 1972, Gíslason was born in Reykjavík.
He lived there until he was 10, when his mother decided to try England. Gíslason attended a posh boarding school in Cheshire for four years, where Susan worked as a secretary, thereby gaining her son a free place and an introduction to the English language and the glories of English literature, with which he fell in love. At 14, he went from posh to rough: Brisbane’s Nashville State High School, now known as Bracken Ridge State High, whose most famous ex-pupil is Boy Swallows Universe author Trent Dalton. Gíslason not only survived but flourished.
And yet throughout his life he has never felt “quite fully of the place”. If once he thought the onus was on him “to make a choice about who I was”, today he’s more comfortable about his mixed identity and his deep love of elsewhere and the joys of being a stranger.
It’s clear to this reader that Gíslason’s true home is his family. He says himself that “fatherhood was what I’d been waiting for my whole adult life”. Running With Pirates is a love letter to Greece, but it’s also a love letter to Finnur and Magnus, two lucky boys with a father willing to release them into their own adventures and misadventures, who writes that “we return to the past and tell it to those we love”.
Running With Pirates is published by UQP on July 30.
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.