Books
The old man and the sea
by Mark Revington
TRAWLER, by Redmond O’Hanlon (Hamish Hamilton, $35).
Looks can be deceiving. Take the photo of Redmond O’Hanlon on the back cover of Trawler: a tall, gangly, grey-haired man in glasses and a red survival suit, looking vaguely pleased with himself, as perhaps he should, after surviving a voyage into a Force 12 hurricane while gutting fish in the bowels of a rusty trawler.
The very image of an intrepid explorer? Hardly. Yet O’Hanlon, long-time natural history editor at the Times Literary Supplement, made three jungle expeditions into hearts of darkness, in Borneo, Brazil and the Congo, and lived to write about each one in three extremely funny books, which combine his love of natural history and his literary talent in a form quite different to anything else you may find on the travel shelves in the local library or bookshop.
And now Trawler, a wildly funny ride on board the 38.5 metre Norlantean, straight into a hurricane, fishing waters a kilometre deep, up to the Arctic Circle. It was, he admitted later, something he had been saving for his “extreme old age”, a journey to be bitten off in a manageable chunk of time.
The Norlantean is so rusty that O’Hanlon on first sight assumes she is ready for the scrap heap. Right next to his quarters in the bow is a huge dent, from a collision on an earlier voyage. The captain, Jason, 30 years old, is renowned as one of the best around. He has a £2 million loan to pay off. He must bring in around £50,000 worth of fish every 10 days, hurricane or not.
O’Hanlon meets Jason on the bridge. “‘Redmond, it’s perfect for you!’ he said, shaking hands, speaking very fast. ‘Perfect! Exactly as you specified – the worst weather at the worst time of the year. There’s Force 11 up there now and the forecast – it’s a 12. And that’s a hurricane. Perfect!’”
O’Hanlon’s entry into this world of tough trawlermen is as nominal assistant to Luke Bullough, a biologist at the Aberdeen Marine Laboratory in Aberdeen, a PhD student, whose passion is deep sea fish. Luke also happens to be a mighty worker. The crew are happy to have him aboard. Of O’Hanlon, who is paying £50 a day for the privilege, they expect nothing except that he will stay in his bunk while they work, for up to 30 hours and more at a stretch. Or maybe he will stand around observing, notebook in hand.
Instead, he throws himself into the life of a trawlerman on an unforgiving ocean, taking his place in the fish room to gut each catch, hauling up all kinds of monsters from the deep, described in great detail – “There in front of me was the Rabbit fish, entire. Luke turned it over … the eyes were bulbous, huge – and it was looking at me smiling. The lateral-line canal (as if someone had cut into its flesh with a Stanley knife) swept up in a happy curve from the base of its thick conical snout to the top of its cheek: a false mouth set in a permanent, emphatic grin. ‘How’s that?’ said Luke, proud of his Rabbit fish. ‘Weird, or what?’”
O’Hanlon’s earlier books were long physical expeditions in search of exotic flora and fauna, leavened by humour, usually focused on his own bumbling efforts or the foibles of his companions.
Trawler is confined pretty much to the relentless, chaotic pitching life below deck as the trawlermen shoot the net, then
spend hours gutting and stowing the catch.
“You only stop fishing when the wind ahead is more powerful than the engines below. Simple. You stop when you can’t keep the net open,” Jason tells him.
Sleep deprivation takes its toll. Wild monologues from O’Hanlon and strange conversations with the crew come rolling in from all angles like the disturbed seas that toss the Norlantean about. It’s churlish to wonder how O’Hanlon remembers everything in such great detail, without the aid of a tape recorder, and anyway such thoughts are soon overtaken by the force of his narrative and his trademark natural-history descriptions as he and Luke spend hours cataloguing monsters of the deep after each catch is stacked away.
As the storm dies down, the trawlermen, all self-restraint washed away by physical exhaustion, crowd into the galley and reveal their deepest fears to the writer. Bryan, the competent first mate, the man any of them would want at the rail if they went overboard because he doesn’t panic, is almost beside himself – “Redmond, there is something I’d like to ask you, to talk to you about …”
What is it the trawlermen fear most? Women, of course. They want O’Hanlon, the writer, to explain their lives to the ones they love. “Because we canna tell them ourselves, that’s for sure because they wouldnae believe it …” says Robbie.
And O’Hanlon, who appears so old to the crew that they nicknamed him Worzel, is happy to dispense the canny wisdom of his 50-plus years, feeling useful perhaps for the first time on the voyage.
