I hadn’t heard of Richard Hughes before picking this book up, but that’s the point of NYRB. They keep adding authors to my favorite writer list. I’m on a serious adventure/travel/extreme story kick this month. I read four of the skinny but jam-packed volumes from Penguin’s Great Journeys series (Marco Polo, Herodotus, Ernest Shackleton, and Henry Walter Bates) and David Grann’s fantastic The Lost City of Z before coming upon this book in the Harvard Square Bookstore.
The back story to this manuscript, like many of the NYRB editions I have read, adds some enjoyment to the reading. Hughes based this story on the Captain’s log of a commercial ship that experienced the horrific hurricane In Hazard obsesses over. I can only imagine how shocking both the scope of the danger and the details of the experience would have been in the 1940’s when this book was released. We have CGI Armageddon every Saturday night these days. We can sit in our living rooms and graphically play war. It’s hard to ignore how desensitized we’ve become. Hughes’s afterword, written in the 1960’s addresses that fact even then. Regardless, the action holds up to any video game or pyromaniac blockbuster.
It’s an incredible tale of adventure, but, like the copy on the back of the book points out, it is certainly more than just the story of a sea-battered ship. Hughes turns the hurricane into this mental/spiritual/psychological force that becomes so fantastic there is no escaping the feeling of the dwarfing swells and howling wind. It is so captivating, in fact, that when one character mistakenly thinks his leg snapped when his rubber boot was half off I gasped out loud from being so on edge.
There is also a fantastically strange pet lemur on board who refuses to let the men close their eyes. A touch of almost magical-realism I enjoyed from the minute Hughes introduced this eccentricity.
I think I’m going to leave my adventuring ways with this book. I’m looking forward to picking up the other Hughes titles NYRB publishes in the near future.
