BLACK MOON

A life of adventure, romance, and mayhem inspired by the 18th-century Irish pirate Anne Bonny.

Very little is known about Bonny’s life, and Wright has filled that blank canvas edge to edge with a saga as wild, lusty, and bloody as any pirate could want, written in maximalist prose combining Old World, nautical, and invented idioms into sentences of befuddling enchantment. His version of the character is named Amethyst Connell, called Meeks, raised by a widowed father she calls Mr Connell until his sudden death thankfully puts an end to the nightly “tuck-in kiss” she endures throughout her early years. Next stop, Miss Haywood’s Hall for Friends of Females, where Meeks has more pleasant bedroom experiences with her best friend, Ash; where she later inaugurates a long career of bladework by stabbing the headmistress with scissors; and where she’s deemed a “cloven colleen” and sent to Mrs Grainne’s “sewing shop for recalcitrant maids.” There she quickly becomes involved in a regular threesome with indistinguishable twin brothers, one of whom she marries and accompanies off to war, where she’s quickly widowed, remarried to a woman, widowed again, then captured by pirates, where her real destiny unfolds. Experiencing ecstasy verging on nirvana while disemboweling some unfortunate opponent (if you can’t handle cheerfully, outlandishly graphic gore, rape, and torture, don’t read this book), she concludes that piracy is “the natural state of woman.” Her extraordinary capacity for bliss is expanded by her romance with Captain Halley Chevers. "Meeks had always known what love was, she’d been in love before, or so she thought, but she now discovered to her surprise there were other continents adjoining that world, places previously unknown, uncharted, uncivilized, and the apprehension of this newer, wilder, almost barbarous element lurking within the entire concept of love only added to the overall elation." Wright’s wild sentences propel Meeks through murderous battles, more threesomes and orgies, and even a scene where she and her beloved companion Tasya use the ship’s head side by side, an activity described as “deposit[ing] a fresh tantadlin tart into the waves.” A tantadlin tart, research shows, was a term coined in the mid-1600s to describe a pastry filled with miscellanies. Indeed.

At 80, Wright has the imaginative energy of a randy teenager channeling the vocabulary of Rabelais and Melville.