Trawler by Redmond O’Hanlon

The book we’re plunging into this week is Trawler by Redmond O’Hanlon. Published in 2003 by Penguin Books, the book falls simultaneously into the twin categories of travel literature and creative non-fiction.

Redmond O’Hanlon is definitely one of my favourite writers. He’s a quirky, oddball non-fiction writer and a scholar held in high esteem in English academia. Formerly the Natural History editor of the Times Literary Supplement, he’s a long-established and respected writer. But while his academic and scholarly works are hailed as insightful, intelligent, and well researched, it’s his travelogues that have won him international acclaim.

Travelling in the style of the Victorian explorers, Redmond O’Hanlon has taken on some mind-blowingly adventurous trips—trips off the edge of any map. His first, Into the Heart of Borneo describes an expedition that saw him and Britain’s poet laureate at the time, James Fenton, venture out on a rickety canoe in combat fatigues and clunky boots, travelling deep into uncharted territory in the Bornean jungle. They took with them stacks of hardcover books on natural history, a somewhat reluctant willingness to experience the unknown, and a wry sense of humour, or at least that’s the way it reads after the fact. O’Hanlon is decidedly a naturalist. In Into the Heart of Borneo, he writes at length and with much enthusiasm about the thousands of exotic bird species they encounter. He also recounts the endless bugs, the peril, and the appalling conditions.

He later heads to the Amazon—Fenton refusing to accompany him this time—and then to the Congo. Both excursions are published as travel books and both knock dead anything else in the genre. They’re painful, funny, horrifying, and infinitely entertaining. He’s a phenomenally good writer and a comical traveller, more like an old bookworm of an uncle than an intrepid outdoorsy type, which makes the reading that much more enjoyable. After all, misadventure makes for good stories.

Trawler departs from his previous style—a more standard travel format where the memorable experiences and local characters are retold in glistening detail, chronologically, his literary skill neatly folded into the text so it’s almost unnoticeable. Instead, Trawler is a piece of literary prowess that mirrors the awesome and terrible nature of the North Atlantic Ocean in the middle of winter, the setting of the story. A pretty large portion of the book is dialogue, long conversations between O’Hanlon and his friend, a deep-sea biologist, Luke Bullough. Bullough is the man who gets him onto the Scottish fishing trawler for the experience, vouching for his old intellectual friend to the trawler captain.  He’s also a volunteer with the Royal National Lifeboat Association, a group that regularly risks its volunteers’ lives to save the lives of sailors on board ships floundering off the coast of northern Scotland. It’s a role that sees him torn from bed at 3 in the morning, to head into hurricane waters…for no money and little in the way of appreciation. O’Hanlon probes Bullough’s willingness to stay a member, despite it repeatedly and irreparably damaging his relationships with women.

Because not very much happens on their North Atlantic journey—the sea is an expansive and empty place, at least on the surface—there really isn’t much of a plot to the book. Instead, O’Hanlon dives into the sometimes-psychotic personalities of the crew. What compels young men to risk all in a hurricane? Money, of course, but there’s something else too, something that drives a certain personality type to take those risks. O’Hanlon relates the stories they tell him and shares the things they confide in him when vulnerable or sleep-deprived. There are a few poignant moments. There are also many moments of rough ridicule as the young crew mock the old writer who spends most of the time on their ship seasick and feeling sorry for himself.

There’s much discussion of fish—weird, deep-sea creatures expounded on at length by Bullough, an exuberant character and someone who is evidently extremely passionate about his chosen career path—and about the fishing industry in general. As sleep-deprivation takes hold, the book itself takes on a surreal hazy nature, that remains entrancing to read.

There may not be much to the plot, but that doesn’t mean the book isn’t exciting. They are on a trawler in the middle of the North Atlantic in a hurricane, after all. It’s terrifying and nauseating, palm-sweatingly intense, in both the sense of being seasick and experience of excitement. I’d easily put Trawler on my top-ten list of new books I’ve read over the past few years. It’s one of those reads that keep you up late at night, in a good way. And when it’s over, you wish it wasn’t.

Set list here: http://www.smithersradio.com/stationplaylist/interrobang-playlist-05222012