Novelist Clifford Jackman
I’m very interested in politics and group dynamics and what can make them go wrong. What can make people suddenly act so crazily? What can cause extreme behaviours to develop?
The Braver Thing Clifford Jackman Random House Canada
Treasure Island meets Lord of the Flies — that’s how Clifford Jackman’s publishers are hyping his swashbuckling pirate adventure, The Braver Thing.
Jackman figures that’s an OK description. “I like pirates,” he says. “That’s the main reason for the book.” So naturally he’s flattered by those comparisons with Robert Louis Stevenson’s evergreen children’s classic. But that’s not all that was on Jackman’s mind in writing the novel.
He also buys into the reference to Lord of the Flies, William Golding’s harrowing story about a group of marooned youngsters whose lives degenerate into savagery when they try to survive in a world devoid of order. He was also thinking about George Orwell’s Animal Farm when writing his new novel. Furthermore, at the front of the book, published by Random House, you find philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s famous warning about “madness in the multitude” and the “seditious roaring of a troubled nation.”
The Braver Thing is about a pirate voyage that goes horribly, horribly wrong and can be seen as a metaphor for the consequences of systemic breakdown in society or government. Along the way, however, it delivers enough lively incident to satisfy the most jaded appetite for skulduggery on the high seas. It’s full of epic battles and storms, of lootings and attacks on island bastions, of mutinies and assassinations.
Jackman first made his mark in 2015 with the Giller-listed The Winter Family, a blood-drenched saga about a murderous gang fulfilling its skewered vision of Manifest Destiny in 19th century America — and he was candid back then in saying that first and foremost he hoped he had delivered a “fun book.”
He figured The Winter Family had a kinship with filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. “A movie like Pulp Fiction, where people are getting shot all the time, is in some ways a kind of lighthearted fun movie,” he told Postmedia in 2015. He aimed for something similar with his own fiction.
But what of The Braver Thing, a novel with a more troubling subtext? Is it also a “fun” book? “I guess so,” he says tolerantly. “It depends on what you think is fun.” Point taken: Jackman is still firm about his determination to entertain the reader, but more serious concerns underlay his engaging narrative. Which is why it’s possible to see a relevance to events in the world today, even to the convulsions set off by the age of Donald Trump.
Both of Jackman’s novels reveal a fascination with communities, with systems, cultures and hierarchies, and what happens to them under stress.
“I’m a lawyer,” he emphasizes in a phone interview from his home in Guelph, Ont. “I’m very interested in politics and group dynamics and what can make them go wrong. What can make people suddenly act so crazily? What can cause extreme behaviours to develop?”
These themes drive a robust tale set in the early 18th century when piracy seems to be on the wane. Jimmy Kavanagh, a former shipmate of the notorious Blackbeard, assembles “a company of gentlemen of fortune” to embark on a bold adventure of plundering and looting. It will be piracy’s last hurrah and will leave crew members financially secure for life. Or at least that’s the promise of early triumphs — until unexpected events trigger a series of power struggles aboard the vessel and a lethal disintegration of the values that once held this pirate culture together.
And when Jackman talks of “values” he’s not being facetious: pirates may have been criminals but they did not tolerate disorder within their own community.
“Pirates had a very interesting way of governing themselves. They’re out in the middle of the ocean and, unlike criminal organizations based on land, they can’t really haul in external people to settle problems. There’s a very strong democratic element governing a ship, and if people are unhappy, there’s nobody to call in to stop them.”
In Jackman’s view, the pirate culture offers “a very good metaphor for an entire world or a single nation because it is so enclosed.” The more he researched piracy the more intrigued he became with its dynamics.
“What these pirates used to do, whether they were legitimate privateers — as some of them were early on — or whether they were pirates, was to sit down and have a meeting and vote. They were very democratic. They had money set aside for people who got injured, they had their own justice system — there was an entire system that they had to build themselves while hermetically sealed from the rest of the world.”
Jackman points out there is a substantial literature probing the mystery of why and how a society fails. In Animal Farm “the revolution falls apart because the pigs are evil, the leadership class is evil ... and the normal animals let them get away with it.” Then there’s Lord of the Flies where social breakdown occurs simply because “the boys are trying to survive and waiting to be picked up.” As for the pirates in The Braver Heart: “These guys are a criminal enterprise. The challenges of being criminal, as opposed to simply being cast away, puts a lot of stress on their fellowship.”
But is there relevance to all this in the present?
“The book was well underway at a time when it seemed inconceivable that Trump would ever get elected,” Jackman says. “So it has no direct relationship to events in the United States.”
Yet, a relationship emerges when he looks at the troubled ship of state that constitutes today’s America.
“It’s like a ship that has been sailing itself for awhile. You don’t necessarily need good captains or a disciplined crew. But now that we’re entering choppier waters we’re seeing the difference between people who really know what they’re doing and those who don’t. My book wasn’t intended as an allegory but it’s very applicable to what’s happening right now — at least in my opinion.
“It’s very hard to say what makes up a happy ship crew or a happy government. It’s not any one thing. It’s kind of a million tiny little things. But only a few things can go wrong to turn into a vicious cycle where things get even worse.”