For, as we learn from Father Chris's first-person narrative, couched as a memoir, some 300 years in the past—but only a short time ago on his individual subjective timeline—our protagonist was Captain Chris, pirate scourge of the Caribbean, mate to the feisty pirate queen Novia. From Tortuga to Jamaica to Portobello to Maracaibo, he and his bloody-minded girlfriend, along with a host of colorful fellow rogues, raise Cain, reaving, murdering, conniving, cheating, revenging, loving and generally thumbing their noses at propriety and the establishment.

Wolfe packs his tale with so much incident that to summarize Captain Chris's exploits would take nearly as long as the novel itself. Suffice it to say that every possible trope of the pirate tale is expertly deployed. We have stowaways, maroonings, storms at sea, duels with guns and swords, noble villains and nasty officials, buried treasure, assaults on fortresses, exotic aboriginals, fortuitous reunions, sad separations, sailing lore and resounding cannonades. All that's missing—if missing you deem it—is the supernatural, for Captain Chris' milieu and exploits are unwaveringly naturalistic and mimetic.

But Wolfe's got even that angle covered in his parallel thread, the contemporary account involving Father Chris' initial timeslip, his inadvertant return to the present—and his earnest attempts to go back across the ages once more to the era of "pirate freedom" and his beloved Novia.

Undercutting Jolly Roger's cliches

This novel is remarkably straightforward for Gene Wolfe, offering very few tricksy narrative knots or epistemological occultism. (Which is not to say that complex patterning is missing. For instance, a minor character named Valentin whom we think is offstage for good resurfaces more than 100 pages later.) Any major enigmas that do exist surround the time-travel aspect, and even that material becomes pretty transparent midway through, especially for readers versed in such matters. (In fact, a definite homage to Jack Finney's classic Time and Again [1970] seems at play here.) So Wolfe is freed instead to deliver straight-up adventure in the mold of Robert Louis Stevenson, Rafael Sabatini or even the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

We start with a winning hero who never entirely sheds his charming naivete, no matter how bloody his hands get or how many skirts he lifts. Chris' voice resembles that of other young Wolfean protagonists, such as the hero of the Wizard Knight series. But it's a bit more slangy. His jokes featuring anachronistic allusions, such as when he notes that his ship, the Castillo Blanco, doesn't sell hamburgers, add a pleasant irreverence to the tale not often found in Wolfe's novels.

We next add in vivid secondary characters such as Novia herself, the slave girl Azuka, the pirate captain Bram Burt (all of whom exhibit very different voices) and a scrupulous attention to historical and technical details (such as the depiction of a pirate ship's refitting in Chapter 11) to produce a highly palpable saga. At every possible moment, Wolfe also makes sure to substitute hard reality in place of any cliché.

Wolfe's plotting mimics the unpredictability of real life, in that the events that befall Chris and company often stutter, backtrack, fall apart or cascade into unforeseen consequences. This has the effect of keeping the reader on his or her toes, but also lacks any kind of archetypical arc for our hero. Sometimes it seems as if it's just one damn thing after another until the end. But certainly the ride is never less than rip-snorting.