Hysterically funny, nowhere unkind, adventurous setting, filled with biological factods, and it ends in sight of a moral or two.
It's on a trawler, is all, a trawler based in northern Scotland but working more northerly yet, even into the Arctic Circle, even in a hurricane in January. The author is fiftyish and bookish and a bit nebbish and completely not in training; he gets there having apprenticed in the Marine Laboratory and met a doctoral student known to the trawler captain.
O'Hanlon has done some physically effortful things, and worked for years on the literary end of natural history, but working on a trawler is harder and more detailed than he was prepared for. His humor is so self-deprecatory that he probably exaggerates his unpreparedness, but maybe not: there must have been plenty. This is like most , and also Frost on my Moustache, with which it shares some locations.
The intellectual unpreparedness is in trying to keep up with the incredible variety and mystery of the fish, etc., being hauled out of the deep sea; it would be hard enough to keep up with the knowledge of the trawlermen, but impossible to absorb everything the researcher says. Worse, everyone is working incredibly hard without sleep over a period of weeks, and in the sleep deprivation the conversations become both loopy and heartfelt. (They also have to be mostly made up; the author's self-described state couldn't distinguish between waking and sleeping, let alone take notes on someone else's talk.)
The sad thing is how much fish they have to throw away because the (obviously necessary) fishery management rules only give a license for one kind of catch at a time. Well, the really sad thing is that they know they don't know enough about many of their fish to be sure they aren't destroying the fisheries, which they really don't want to do; especially the captain, with a two-million-pound loan for a trawler that does this kind of fishing. None of the trawlermen seem opposed to fishery management; they object to fleets that they think cheat, but they greatly admire Iceland's cannily managed fishery, and one of them tells the researcher where, perhaps, to find the breeding grounds of a fish, because the knowledge might protect the fish in the long run.
Iceland is probably also admired for being adequately far north; there's a definite opinion among the trawlermen that admirable peoples begin where the speaker is and become more admirable as one moves north: points are probably given for living on an especially exposed and rocky coast.
ISBN: 1400042753
So wrote clew in History (21st c.). | TrackBack