by Horatio Clare
Rose and Crown, Larkhall, 6th December 2018
Present: Steve (this choice), John, Chris B, Chris W, Mark T
(later), Willm.
Apologies from Mark W, Andrew and Richard.
The book was selected partly because this month’s reading director, Steve, particularly likes travel books and hadn’t read a good one for a while. Having met a relative of Clare’s at a dinner party, and having as a result found that he hadn't read as widely in the genre as he thought, Steve decided to inflict him upon the rest of the BBC. So how did it go?
This is a good journalist’s account of modern global shipping at work. Through the offices of Danish giant Maersk, Clare tagged a ride on two container ships, one heading to east Asia from Harwich, the other crossing the Atlantic from Antwerp to Montreal. His intention was to reveal something of the way these massive craft influence global trade, and, more interestingly one suspects for Clare, to find out more about the kind of men (mostly men) who make their living and their lives on board.
It was soon revealed that the club contains a number of frustrated seamen, as well as some who remain resolute in their determination to have as little as possible to do with it.
John was at one point in life going to go to sea but it didn’t happen – and this book popped a lot of dreams for him. It was interesting to see how introverted many of the crew were – retiring, not really mixing, just getting the hours in until their next leave or promotion. He enjoyed the details about the crew – skipper Petrus Koop’s father was a bishop in Brazil… He saw moments of genius in the writing , such a Larson peering over his glasses in the playground as a fat little kid – a very evocative description.
So for John, a good read, enjoyable, though interspersed with moments when it was frankly a bit of a slog. Rather like the voyages.
Steve was another frustrated mariner. For him it was a sporadically fascinating window onto a rarely written-about world. Some of the statistics were extraordinary – although how Maersk could be making millions of pounds sterling a day, as claimed earlier in the book, when it cost more to ship the containers than the goods inside them, was unclear. For Steve the biggest stumbling block was the writing. Strangely unformed sentences got in the way of a clear description, as though the author imagined himself driven in some way by a kind of poetic muse that forced him to change the order of words around simply to make it sound more interesting. Some passages were great – the frozen run in to Montreal for example, or the description of finding the Pembroke in Antwerp. But others just didn’t work and paled in comparison with Nicolas Monserrat, Robin Knox-Johnson etc etc.
Chris B enjoyed the basic premise of demonstrating how the stuff we use gets to be where it is in the world and how vital these precise schedules are. It’s the most polluting industry in the world – though right now steps are being taken to improve that – which is a conundrum in itself. His initial momentum on pollution rather faded, but the descriptions of the ships in rough weather were evocative and vivid. He’d have liked to know more about navigation, how they were taught, what happened when it went wrong… and historical references , particularly the WW2 convoys, lent depth and context – travelling over peoples’ graves. He found the book a powerful case for doing more about the pollution issued by the industry and wished the author had been a bit more dogged in this respect – but on the other hand it was good that the book didn’t preach, leaving the reader to make up their own mind.
Chris W wondered what our review would have been like if the group was made up of women instead of men. In which event, it was pointed out, we probably wouldn’t have chosen it. But the point was well made – it is a very male dominated society, and the appearance of the one female (Annabel the cook) wasn’t enough to counterpoint the very ‘heavy metal’ engineering focus. How amazing to change a cylinder casing while still travelling along. The ships couldn’t hide from bad weather, they had to choose their route carefully to minimise risk while losing as little time as possible. It was the human aspects that Chris felt were missing – more detail about the families left at home, the hardships endured on the other side of the equation – but interesting and enjoyable.
Willm declared himself not a sea person., and initially he found the book fairly uninteresting and uninvolving. But as the voyages developed, he found himself increasingly drawn in. The emphasis on the everyday dangers, the hardships of the crew, particularly the Filipinos, and the pay differential between them and the Europeans. Willm was amused by the descriptions of the Filipino expertise at getting massive suitcases through airline security at the last possible moment, as they took spoils home to their families. He liked the writer’s own admission of the difficulty of capturing the motion of a big ship across the waves in writing. Though ‘snippety’, he enjoyed the book once he was into it.
Mark T found it interesting to read this book describing a world about which he knew little. He found some episodes fascinating – the description of Vietnam; the sheer magnitude of the ship (particularly the Gerd); the sad sad barbecue scene where no one really wanted to be there but everyone dutifully went – in a storm. There was possibly too much about storms. In the final analysis for Mark it didn’t have enough about it to really make the experience fulfilling – interesting in parts but ultimately a bit boring.
Mark W found the premise of the book interesting and original.The mis of narrative and reflections worked for a while but lost momentum after a while. There’s a limit to the number of observations about whales, diesel engines, the weather etc. that a non-mariner can take on. In exception to this was the section from Chapters 17-19, including the build-up to the storm and the storm itself. Perhaps another gear was engaged for this section? And augmented very effectively by the choice of extracts from Eugene O’Neill and Nicolas Monserrat. Unfortunately the extracts sometimes pointed up the shortcomings of the author’s own prose, but it did turn out to be a little better than at one point feared.
Richard enjoyed the book and found himself enjoying it more, the more he read. Lots to like but not a great book. We learned a great deal about the importance of shipping to global trade, both now and throughout history (who knew that Bristol’s favourite John Cabot was in fact a Venetian?) The passages on the WW2 convoys were very effective. The descriptions of wildlife were also helpful in bringing life to the narrative – the birds that join the ship for long periods and then disappear. Richard enjoyed the lists of cargos and the people who would benefit from them, his political motivations as well and agonising over the unfairness even to this day of the way these huge shipping lines are run. So there was plenty to like, a really wide range of information and some very descriptive prose. But despite this, Richard found the momentum slowing occasionally, and the style rather lost its power when the author wasn’t up on his soapbox. But not a bad book at all and am interesting alternative (and in Richard’s view an improvement upon) the last book about the sea that we read – Sea of Poppies.
Andrew was another who was looking forward to the mix of wind, waves, steel and men doing what me do… and found the author gifted at putting thoughts on the page and conjuring up the extremes of weather and the occasional dramas that occur throughout the voyages he describes. Nonetheless the journey was a tough one. Mostly because of the way the book was constructed. Some crew members’ stories were presented as anecdotes by other sailors – their introductions felt clunky and contrived, they were often too brief to make meaningful contributions and sometimes felt like wrong turns. Perhaps a little more editing of the material he’d collected would have made Clare’s book a more coherent whole?
So a broadly favourable response, for a range of reasons, although no-one found that it really set the world on fire.
Scores:
John 6.75
Steve 6.5
Chris B 7.0
Chris W 6.4
Willm 8.0
Mark T 4.5
Mark W 6.0
Richard 7.5
Andrew 4.0
Average 6.294
