© 1979 by Justin
Scott
Well, thanks to Shipkiller, I now know all I ever wanted
to know about deep-sea sailing, but was afraid to ask. I’ve lived 430 pages over four days with jibs
and genoas and lateens, ketches, trimarans and beams, rigging and dhows and
lanshes (sp?), dead-reckoning navigation, squalls, and, yes, even gross gross
gross sea snakes.
Now, truth be
told, I don’t really know about all the methods and materials of deep-sea
sailing. To be perfectly honest, it
would probably scare the heck outta me.
Consider the ocean itself: massive, dark, bottomless, id-like. I remember bobbing in the middle of Lake George as a lad, awaiting the return of the
powerboat after I wiped out on water skis.
My only thought, troublesomely terrifying but held in check, was
wondering what swam below and beneath, me at its mercy, me at the mercy of
powerful yet simple forces beyond my control.
I can only imagine being alone in the middle of the Atlantic in a sailboat would be exponentially
more frightening.
Peter Hardin does
not find the sea frightening. He thrives
upon it, master and commander of himself, his boat, and the waves. A middle-aged doctor who retired after a
medical invention brought him untold millions, he and his wife Carolyn
blissfully sail the seas, falling ever more in love with adventure and freedom
and each other.
That is, until Leviathan, the world’s largest
supertanker, runs them down somewhere in the northeastern Atlantic .
Their ship is destroyed, Carolyn is lost, and Hardin, catching the
killer ship’s name and registry before blacking out, barely survives. The tanker continues on, Goliath unaware of
even David’s presence, a giant with no knowledge of the gnat it just happened
to squash.
Our hero, barely
alive, is found washed ashore on an English coast by a Nigerian doctor who
nurses him back to health over the long days and weeks and months. Eventually she falls in love with him,
consoling him when one by one every legal and political channel denies him
justice for the death of his beloved wife on the high seas.
What else to do,
a hundred pages in, except develop an intense Ahab complex?
We follow Hardin
closely as he concocts a plan to sink the Leviathan:
a new sailboat built for vengeance, an illegal weapon procured for the tanker’s
destruction (which brings him to the attention of various national intelligence
organizations), a meticulously-plotted course to hunt his prey down, and a
whole host of adversaries – the tempestuous Cape of Good Hope, Iranian
hovercraft pilots, the eeeevil crotchety Captain Ogilvy of the Leviathan, and those nasty nasty nasty
sea snakes. Heck, that part in the sea
storm where Hardin’s sailboat is actually completely underwater brought previously slumbering neuroses and phobias up
from my subconsciousness.
Oh, yeah, and
there’s a stretch two-thirds of the way in where we’re certain Hardin’s mind
has gone completely AWOL. Something
about the hidden meaning of triangles and not speaking a word for five straight
weeks …
Hardin
encounters his nemesis three times on the high seas in his bloodlust drive for
revenge. The first time, with the help
of his Nigerian lover (Ishmael’s stand-in here?) our pseudo-sane doctor is
faced with the choice of mutual destruction or no destruction. The second, chased by just about every single
OPEC air and watercraft, results in, well, basically stubbing the giant’s toe
and, yes, plummeting into those snake infested Gulf waters. And the final confrontation –
Well, you’ll
just have to read this page-turner.
Grade: A –
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