‘Silver: Return to Treasure Island,’ by Andrew Motion

Alas for the unintended cruelty of a book-reviewing aunt! On the long ride to catch the sunset from the dunes above Lake Michigan, I handed my restless 7-year-old nephew a book from my beach bag: Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island." Instantly and intently, he began reading aloud, propelled by the excitement of discovery. Later, back at the cottage, he asked, "Can I have my book now?" Guiltily, I told him he'd have to wait: I needed it for a story I was writing about "Treasure Island" and its new sequel, "Silver," by the British poet Andrew Motion. I felt like a blackhearted mutineer.

Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

SILVER

Return to Treasure Island

By Andrew Motion

403 pp. Crown Publishers. $ 24.

But my nephew should count himself lucky. A boy who read "Treasure Island" when the book was first published in 1883 would have had to wait much longer than he did for a continuation of the adventures of the hapless but doughty innkeepers' son, Jim Hawkins, and the wily one-legged pirate Long John Silver, who sailed on the Hispaniola seeking the doubloons of the notorious Captain Flint. The hoard they found was so vast they couldn't haul it all back to England, so they took the gold and left the silver behind. Just as a gun that appears in Act I of a play must be fired before the curtain closes, a second treasure trove demands a second expedition. But Stevenson never launched one. He died in 1894, at the age of 44, a year after the publication of "Catriona," the sequel to his second most famous novel, "Kidnapped."

Stevenson had begun "Treasure Island" in 1881, a year after he married an American divorcée. To entertain her young son, Stevenson spent his mornings inventing stories about Long John Silver, drawing for inspiration on childhood memories and Washington Irving's "Tales of a Traveller," among other sources. In the afternoon, he would read his compositions aloud to his stepson and his father. "I had counted on one boy," he recalled in "My First Book," a frank essay about his authorial insecurities. "I found I had two. . . . My father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness of his original nature."

"Treasure Island" quickly became a beloved classic. So influential has Stevenson remained (Twain, Nabokov, Borges and Hemingway were all admirers) that it's almost unimaginable to contemplate the audacity — the effrontery, even — of someone attempting to extend Stevenson's invention and mimic his style, as if Long John Silver's parrot were perched on his shoulder, squawking phrases into his ear. But this, happily, is what Andrew Motion, Britain's poet laureate from 1999 to 2009, has not only attempted but accomplished, with deft derring-do.

In "Silver," which is set some 35 years after "Treasure Island," Motion introduces us to the son of Jim Hawkins, the original boy adventurer. Decades after making his adolescent splash, Hawkins père has washed up in a gloomy, rum-soaked middle age, running an inn on the Thames. Jim Jr., serving as narrator, explains that his father had spent a decade in London, squandering his pirate booty on high living, before settling down to innkeeping and marriage with a woman who died giving birth to their child. Since then, the widower's only joy has lain in endless retellings of his swashbuckling glory days. Neglected but sheltered, his son has spent his boyhood roving the nearby marshes, doling out grog for his father's patrons and longing for his own nautical escapades. So when a mysterious olive-skinned girl, Natty, glides in on a wherry called the Spyglass and invites him to join her on a quest for the abandoned silver, Jim can't resist.

Natty Silver is the daughter of his father's foe, Long John Silver. Like young Jim, she has tired of the rime of her ancient mariner father and yearns to sow fresh color in her own garden of verses. She and Jim are allied, Jim believes, "because a shadow lay across them both. The shadow of our fathers' adventures." But is it prudent for a boy as green as Jim to put himself in the hands of — and onto the ship of — the daughter of his father's enemy? Long John Silver, who has outfitted a fine clipper, the Silver Nightingale, for the journey, tells him that it is. Silver also tells him he's just like his father used to be: "Very brave and very clever. Clever enough to know the value of an adventure, at any rate, and brave enough to carry it out!" Will such sly sycophancy be enough to persuade Jim to step aboard the Nightingale and face unknown dangers? Ask any 7-year-old boy.

Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

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