The Pirates Daughter by Margaret Cezair-Thompson

As the basis of her second novel, Margaret Cezair-Thompson makes use of a little-known bit of 20th-century popular history as a fulcrum to jimmy her way into the intricate themes of race, color, politics, fame and class in her native Jamaica.

As a bonus, she also tells an entertaining and somewhat sudsy family romance without embarrassing herself as a semi-serious writer with semi-literary ambitions.

In a brief stage-setting author’s note, Cezair-Thompson relates the true story of Errol Flynn, the dashing bad-boy matinee idol, and his arrival in Jamaica in 1946 when his schooner, the Zaca, washed ashore in a hurricane. Beguiled by the beauty of the country’s north coast, he bought a small island near Port Antonio and built a house there, where he partied with visiting dignitaries such as Truman Capote as well as fellow ex-pats including Ian Fleming and Noel Coward.

No small part of Jamaica’s allure for Flynn, however, came from his need to lie low while a scandal involving improprieties with an underage girl ran its course in the United States. It was the kind of thing that followed the Tasmanian actor throughout his movie career and the life of masculine debauchery it allowed him to pursue. So it is perfectly logical for Cezair-Thompson to imagine circumstances under which the star of “Captain Blood,” in which he played a pirate, might have unbuckled his swash with some too-young Jamaican lovely.

The girl in question, Ida Joseph, is the daughter of Flynn’s driver and Jamaican guide, Eli Joseph, a white Lebanese taxi driver and small-time entrepreneur married to a local woman of Chinese and African descent. From the age of 13 the precocious Ida is fascinated by Flynn, and though she watches as other schoolgirls fall into disrepute — and worse — after getting pregnant without the benefit of marriage, she is nonetheless a willing participant when Flynn finally seduces her at 15.

Cezair-Thompson, who writes in a congenial prose style, neither too stringent for the casual reader nor too lax for those with more literary tastes, plays a tricky game mixing fictional characters like Ida, Eli and her poor mother, doomed to early death by cancer, and historical figures, the chief of which is Flynn. In many such literary exercises, one type of character overwhelms the other, and it’s usually the fictional ones who have the greater vividness and life force.

It’s a testament to Cezair-Thompson’s skill that when Ida comes down pregnant and Flynn shows his true character by abandoning her — disappointing not only the girl but also her father, who considered the man a friend — the reader does not lose all sympathy for him. Yes, he’s a cad, but he never pretended to anything else, and in this portrayal, he’s a touchingly human cad. Here is the end of a scene in which Ida has gone to tell Flynn she’s pregnant, but winds up sleeping with him instead:

“For a moment he was convinced that a resurrection had occurred; the young Errol Flynn had risen from the pointlessly aging body. She saw it in him too, this renewal, in his easy smile and slow, contented inhalations. She realized that he had looked at other women this way before, and that for him good sex was merely a reflection of himself. He was vain, and he loved her less than she loved him. She knew this but she still wanted him.”

The Pirate’s Daughter contains ambitions beyond a revisionist story of a long-dead philandering movie star and a vulnerable local girl, however. Indeed, Flynn dies well before the novel is half over. Ida’s love for her own daughter, May, is fierce and touching, but she finds she must leave the child behind for work in New York. Some of the strongest passages in the book depict May as an increasingly feral street child, giving up hope of her mother’s return.

If Cezair-Thompson overreaches in the amount of thematic baggage she wishes this novel to carry, it’s not because she has an ax to grind, at least not one she reveals. May grows up in the ’60s and ’70s, just in time to experience the drugs and rebellion of the era, which also coincides with Jamaica’s independence from Britain, and the social chaos that resulted. There’s revolution and reggae, social dislocation and crime.

Near the end, the book turns a bit melodramatic, with the sudden intrusion of violence and murder, and the revelation of a family secret better suited to a potboiler like Rich Man, Poor Man. But these are scant flaws, easily set aside. For the most part, The Pirate’s Daughter is the best kind of middle-brow fiction, neither pandering nor elitist, and not least of its charms is the desire to visit Jamaica that it will inspire in many of its readers.

RATING 6 / 10