Yo ho ho & a bottle of spiced rum
Robert Hough heads to sea
Hough gives life to both stealthy jungle raids and the debauched high life of Port Royal
The Man Who Saved Henry Morgan By Robert Hough House of Anansi 304 pp; $20
The Man Who Saved Henry Morgan, the enthralling new novel from Toronto writer Robert Hough, opens with 20-year-old Benny Wand being convicted of crooked gambling. He is given 10 seconds to decide between the presiding judge’s (“a drunk bastard, all right”) two options: 12 years in Newgate Prison, or transport to Jamaica. “Ten seconds? I didn’t need three seconds.” It’s 1664 — Newgate means certain death. Port Royal, in Jamaica, on the other hand, “had a reputation I’d heard about in seamy rat-run taverns, and from the sounds of it I’d fit right in.”
Within a few pages, Benny has crossed the Atlantic in a gruelling, shackled voyage aboard the ironically named Charity (rendered with skilled, sickening detail), landing in the New World to find the infamous outlaw haven virtually deserted, “padlocked and dark.” Everyone, from tavern-keepers to market-sellers to working girls, is waiting for a ship to come in. As one resident explains, “Ders no money in town, not no more. Not since dem last sailor types go off.”
Benny ends up living rough on a beach with a crowd of fellow convicts and landlocked sailors. It’s there that he first hears of Captain Henry Morgan, England’s most celebrated privateer, “the savviest bastard you’ll ever see. A real on-the-riser and a favourite of the King.”
Yes, that Captain Morgan. The one on the rum labels.
It will surprise no one, given the title of the book, that Benny falls in with Morgan’s crew, first as a lowly scrub boy, but quickly distinguishing himself with his strategic thinking and his skill at chess. The two aspects are so interlinked that he becomes a favourite and confidante of the privateer, meeting him for games both at his stately home and in his quarters aboard ship, offering strategy advice for chess games and battles alike.
Hough immerses the reader in the various worlds in which Benny finds himself, giving life to stealthy jungle raids, the debauched high life of Port Royal, and the opulence of Morgan’s life. As in the best historical fiction, Hough’s research never overwhelms the reader, but lends an unobtrusive authority to the novel as a whole.
The Man Who Saved Henry Morgan follows Benny’s cyclical rise and fall, living lavishly after a successful raid, surrounding himself with the a kindly landlord, a fighting bear and a whore with a forked tongue and a heart of gold (the former literal, the latter figurative), winnowing away into abject pov- erty and ending up back on the beach when the money runs out, waiting with the other sailors for the sign of sails on the horizon. And repeat. Chess may be the key thematic motif of The
Man Who Saved Henry Morgan, but the novel itself reads more like a simple checkers game: the story unfolds with an easy momentum, a narrative push that is consistent and neither falters nor overheats. It’s a remarkably straightforward story (with a sense of the inevitable for anyone who is even slightly cynical) and that’s something of a surprise, coming from a writer like Hough, known for the complexity and interweaving of his narratives, a reputation he’s earned with the stunning novels
The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, nominated for both the Trillium and the Commonwealthe Writer’s Prize, and Giller-longlisted Dr. Brinkley’s Tower.
As Henry Morgan progresses, this straightforwardness comes to feel more like a deliberate choice, and a bit of prestidigitation: in the guise of a swashbuckling adventure, Hough is actually delivering a taut, emotionally fraught character drama. The roiling high seas caper is really an account of a complex, unequal relationship between two realistically drawn characters: a canny, craven mentor and a young man, virtually a boy, desperately seeking a father figure.
In a novel flush with cons and duplicity, this is the best con of them all, and one most readers won’t mind being victims of: The Man Who Saved
Henry Morgan will leave readers well satisfied. Yes, the last few pages clank a little as Hough ensures he dots and crosses the appropriate letters to give Benny the ending he deserves, but that’s a minor quibble. Overall, Hough’s latest is a genuine pleasure to read, and to be taken in by.