The following review, which appeared in the Globe and Mail, is posted here by permission.

Rueful Pirate

ROBERT WIERSEMA 

Easton's Gold

By Paul Butler

Flanker Press, 180 pages, $16.95

With Easton's Gold, St. John's writer Paul Butler returns to the 17th century, to the world of pirate captain Peter Easton, ruthless anti-hero of his previous novel, Easton. Be warned: There's a paucity of swashbuckling in Butler's account of the last voyage of the now-retired pirate.

Instead, Butler builds solid suspense and healthy narrative momentum through a focus on fundamentals: efficient storytelling, keen attention to characterization and fealty to the mysteries of the past and their influence on the present.

As the novel begins, Peter Easton is confined to bed in London, near death, debilitated by a mysterious disease that manifests as a crippling hypersensitivity and a heartbreaking awareness of the suffering of the world around him. At one point, he calls for his servants to rescue flies trapped in spider webs. He is cared for by Gabrielle, a lovely young servant with a secretive past, who finds a cure for his condition in the shop of a mysterious apothecary named Fleet.

As Easton recovers his strength, he discovers that his new sensitivity to suffering has not left him, and he seeks to make amends for the bloody deeds of his previous life. Chief among these is to recover the illegitimate son he abandoned in remote Newfoundland. Accompanied by his household and the apothecary, he sets sail for the New World on a mission from which he assumes he will not return.

Butler manages to avoid the easy outs offered by his narrative line, largely resisting happy endings and easy epiphanies through an unflinching care in characterization. Easton stands at the centre of the book as a convincing welter of contradictions. Ostensibly seeking redemption, he nonetheless remains capable of heartless cruelty and psychic violence. Gabrielle and Fleet are as skillfully drawn. Butler doesn't belabour their secrets, but allows them to shape the characters' actions in ways that aren't always clear at first, but make perfect sense in retrospect.

While the ending is somewhat jarring in its optimism and ease (especially considering that darkness that has come before), Easton's Gold is nonetheless a compelling novel which often surprises and satisfies.

Robert J. Wiersema's first novel, Before I Wake, will be published this fall.