One of my favorite authors, Redmond O'Hanlon, has done it again, written a magnificent book. This time his subject is not a trek through Borneo, the Congo or Amazonia, but the tough Scottish lads who man trawlers that fish the North East Atlantic. In January. In Force 12 storms. With no sleep for days on end.
Absolutely fascinating, incredibly well-written, as are his previous books.
A magnificent bit of adventure, natural history, description, and humanity.
And you are obviously asking yourself, why is C2 gushing about a book here? After all, there are a lot of other places to rant and rave.
Apart from the fact that the "normal" Q boards are deadly dull and boring at this juncture, with folks still battling over silly, minuscule stuff of historical value only, a subject which is tangential to Q-heads at SI and is alive has reared up its head within this magnificent book which contains a florid description of that not-so metaphorical beast......the hagfish.
I dare not post this at the Moderated board for fear of getting attacked for not using the proper taxonomic name of the hagfish, or not providing alternative sources for following its evolutionary path, or other such nonsense which seems to be the focus of discussion. Thanks, Mq, for providing this lacunae of sanity.
Back to the hagfish.
You'll have to get to the very end of the book, p. 333 in my edition, to read the good stuff on this disparaged creature which, on closer inspection, is a very interesting fish.
Did you know it can tie itself into a knot? And obviously untie itself as well?
A lowly hagfish, yes, a single one of them, can kill a shark.
It has no family tree--descended directly from only God knows what and unchanged for millions upon millions of years.
It's survival mechanism is simply amazing. A row of darkish spots along the side which excrete a substance that when mixed with seawater turns into gallons and gallons of foul-tasting slime. A shark eats a hagfish, is overwhelemed by the slime choking off all its bodily functions.
Sharks don't fiddle with hagfish. No other fish has developed a means of dealing with its slime so it has prospered for eons. A perfect animal. Not a single fish in the ocean can attack it and live.
The Washington Post's review of Trawler:
amazon.com
Bad trips are the best. Would you rather watch a home movie of the perfect holiday or hear how it all unraveled? For hardcore fans of wretched travel, Redmond O'Hanlon is as reliable as Imodium. An erudite English writer, expert in natural history, he's known for jungle misadventures whose very titles -- No Mercy, In Trouble Again -- promise biblical woe: leeches, vipers, malaria, piranhas. Where other travelers relish olives in the Tuscan sun, O'Hanlon sucks eyeballs out of monkey skulls in the Amazon.
Trawler, O'Hanlon's latest, begins with characteristic masochism. The study-bound writer decides he must take the worst boat ride on Earth -- aboard a commercial fishing vessel in the far north Atlantic -- in the worst possible conditions: a winter hurricane. As he leaves his snug Oxfordshire home for the Scottish port of Scrabster, the reader braces for punishing winds, epic seasickness and foul-mouthed fishermen who park gutting knives behind their ears, all of which O'Hanlon delivers with darkly comic effect.
But what separates Trawler from other hellishly funny travelogues is its vision of working conditions so extreme that trauma and shock are routine: simply an occupational hazard. Trawlermen don't just lose their lives with regularity. What they risk losing each time out are their minds.
It "occurred to me that I might be going mad," O'Hanlon writes, sure at one point that he's just spoken to the crew when he was, in fact, asleep with his face in a plate. "It's so frightening," he tells his shipmates, "because I thought I was talking to you!" To which one of them replies: "Oh that . . . we all get that."
Before going mad, O'Hanlon must endure an awful initiation aboard a rusted "death-trap" whose skipper is so deep in debt that he fishes in a hurricane when every other captain stays in. O'Hanlon, overweight and over-aged at 51 (he could be father to most of the crew), instantly gets sick, flops into walls and gores his palms while gutting fish. The only calm, of sorts, comes in his turbulent bunk or in the stifling galley, where the men tuck into haggis, fried pizza and fried Mars bars. His shipmates also offer O'Hanlon soothing advice. As one puts it: "The weather! Who cares? You either die or you don't -- and you die all together."
Most sea tales suffer from romance. In Trawler, there's none. The rare view of ocean is menacing, not majestic: a wall of icy froth and dark water that's as claustrophobic as the gutting room where O'Hanlon spends almost all his time, assisting a marine biologist named Luke. Through him, we meet the phantasmagoric array of creatures the trawler's nets drag up from the deep: rabbit fish, sea-bat, snotfish and the hagfish, which suffocates its prey with slime and bores up the anuses of drowned sailors. As amusing and educational as much of this is, readers who prefer their fish battered or grilled may tire of Luke's exhaustive dissections.
The book's human specimens are more enthralling. Trawler, at its best, reads like a black-box transcription of minds trying to stay afloat while crushed by remorseless labor, cold, stress, sleep loss and fear of sudden death. "Your body thinks there's a battle on, and so it's packed you full of adrenalin," Luke says, a few days out. "So the brain tries to order itself for survival, to sort its memories, to clear itself for action by talking instead of dreaming." What results isn't conversation; it's manic, stream-of-subconscious outbursts from the psychic depths. After a week, things get worse. "The brain, memories, pictures, they shut down, they go all dead and dark, they don't care any more," Luke says. "You'll see! We'll be unable to speak. Zombies!"
O'Hanlon is just the man to guide us through this meltdown. A Prozac-quaffing depressive who once wrote of ingesting a jungle hallucinogen called yoppo, he knows the bad-trip sensation of watching his own mind unhinge. "I've never felt like this before," he jabbers at Luke. "The boss, the organizer, you know, the internal tough guy that we sometimes resent and always obey, the Mister Big who directs our thoughts, Luke -- he's gone! He's ceased to exist!" O'Hanlon also contrasts the fear he feels in stormy seas with his fleeting terror in the jungle of arrows and machetes: "this, this massively weighted indifferent murderous pounding all about us -- there's no romance about it, nothing personal," he writes. "And it doesn't stop, it goes on and on. "
And so does O'Hanlon. His fevered, exclamatory prose and Tom Wolfe-like bursts -- "wop!" "pow!" "ping!" "zap!" -- suit the lunacy of his trip. So do the high-octane confessionals that run for pages, broken only by the occasional "aye" uttered by whoever is listening. But this kind of writing loses flavor at book-length. Ultimately, O'Hanlon overcooks an intense but brief adventure of two weeks or so that would have been fresher with a third of its contents filleted.
The nonstop talk in Trawler -- Luke and O'Hanlon banter for whole chapters like mad dons in an Oxford dining hall -- also can't be read as strictly nonfictional. Most of it occurs while the author is frantically gutting fish in wild seas with so much noise that everyone shouts. O'Hanlon is so deranged by fatigue that his rational mind barely works. Yet he repeatedly renders, verbatim, rapid-fire and pitch-perfect monologues of several thousand words, often laced with Orkney and Shetland dialect, on subjects as knotted as European Union fishing quotas and sexual selection by hedge sparrows. This simply isn't credible, and it needlessly camouflages O'Hanlon's virtuosity. He should have taken long passages out of quote marks to make it clear they're filtered through his supple intellect and ear for language.
Trawler nonetheless paints a memorable and unexpectedly tender portrait of men who perform one of the world's most demanding jobs. In the end, even the ship's rock-solid first mate falls apart, confiding that he weeps each time he returns to his wife and worries that he'll lose her by loving her too much. Then there's Robbie, who boards the trawler bandaged after a drunken brawl his last night ashore. Mid-storm, he describes the loveliest passage of his young life: a jail stay for decking two cops in a pub. "Prison -- I'm telling you, marvelous! A holiday! A hotel for trawlermen!" Robbie exclaims. In the brig, he enjoyed regular food and sleep and, incredibly, "No cold at all." The idyll ended prematurely when he was released for good behavior. They "owed me three full months!" he indignantly concludes.
By the time Trawler docks, the reader knows exactly how Robbie felt. |
