A vast array of novels have carved their plots from the remnants of history.
Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy exemplified how these morsels of archival facts could be the framework for weaving out new imaginations of the past. In the boom of Irish fiction, we find Nuala O’Connor cementing her craft in this area.
Her award-winning Nora (2021), a fictionalisation of the life of Nora Barnacle, was released to critical acclaim. O’Connor has done it again with her latest novel, Seaborne. Set in the early 1700s, Seaborne takes the reader on a transatlantic journey from Kinsale to Charleston, as the narrative follows Anne Bonny’s life from child to pirate.
'Why cannot she love who she loves without constraint?’, asks Seaborne, and our heroine Anne embraces this fluidity without thought for oppressive societal constraints that try to hold her back. In many ways, this is two parallel love stories: between Anne and an indentured servant, Bedelia, on her family plantation in the States; and between Anne and the sea. Anne and Bee’s love story is complicated, not least as Anne is the daughter of Bee’s slaver. Anne is steadfast in rejecting both this dynamic and societal homophobia, as they escape to the sea together. Out on the open waters ‘all sorrows [for Anne] go to rest’.
This is a dazzling novel. It seems nearly cliché to describe a book as a ‘beach read’, especially a book so concerned with the tides, but O’Connor’s Seaborne is the perfect accompaniment to an escape from the everyday.
This summer readers are going to fall in love with Anne; she’s the ultimate bisexual pirate icon Irish fiction has been waiting for.
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