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REVIEW: Trawler
Redmond O'Hanlon

By Neville W Goodman
Contact the author by e-mail at christopher.johnstone@ntlworld.com

I am not a water person. 1'11 swim if it's a hot day or the water is warm, by which I mean continental warm, not the "It's lovely when you're in" sort of English seaside holiday warm. I don't like going on boats if I can tell they're moving in any direction other than forwards: up and down and side to side disagree with me. I find inland waterways confining. But I do have a real point of contact with Trawler: I love fish. Not in the way that Luke, a marine biologist and one of Redmond O'Hanlon's fellow crew on the Norlantean, loves them, but to eat. If you eat something, it's your duty to know a bit about how it gets to your plate. So I read Trawler. O'Hanlon knows a little about biology, having been Natural History editor of the TLS, but he is now a travel writer. He volunteered to help crew a trawler out of Orkney skippered by a fishing genius whose £2M mortgage for his boat meant that he sailed into a force 12 to catch fish when everyone else remained aport. The first step in getting fish to plates is dirty, smelly, exhausting, dangerous work. Trawlermen are exempt from the European Working Time Directive, would scoff at mandatory periods of compensatory rest, and indulge in arcane superstitious routines because they know that the sea is capriciously merciless.

Working on a trawler is viciously tiring, and these guys need all the sympathy we can drum up, but the book is unsatisfying precisely because O'Hanlon is so good at portraying the claustrophobically mind-numbing unrelenting toil, and even worse attempted relaxation. The book is almost all staccato dialogue, much of it shouted with the hysterical over-emphasis of the overtired. I got fed up of Luke yelling no one had any idea about 99.37% of the life in the deep oceans by around page 74. O'Hanlon, endearingly given the nickname Worzel, asks himself, "What on earth had I said to Luker', and answers himself, "I'd no idea." But this is on page 171, after pages of conversation with Luke, and many more to come. Did he have a tape recorder? Or do we take it that the book is just as much a stream of semi-consciousness as the events he lived through? He did have a Nikon camera, but we don't see any of the photographs (except of the crew and ship) that he took, which is a pity. I should like to have seen some of Luke's spectacular fish.

O'Hanlon is seasick at first, the waves ("lumps") in the force 12 are horrendous, serious injury is avoided but only just. I got fed up of incoherent screamings about the wonders of evolution and passages I coujd barely follow that seemed to be about alpha males and hedge sparrows, but heartened that Luke was petrified at having to give university lectures. I have no fear of that, but I'm not going to sea in a trawler.And thank you for the fish.

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