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.

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.

Loading

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.