Trawler
The Daily Show, hosted by John Stewart, is one of my favorite TV news programs. I think it's my only favorite TV news station, as I find every other network news source obsessed with death, famine, war, chaos, crime, and general all-around destruction and evil. Nightly news reports are nothing but murders, rapes, riots, suicide bombings, train derailments, kidnappings, beheadings, and the occasional political commentary filled with re-hased political jargon and socio-political mumbo-jumbo that your basic American TV view cannot translate, much less understand.
So when TV news is injected with a shot of fresh comedy, it comes as sweet relief. Somehow, John Stewart manages to deliver apocalptic news each and every night (all of it factual) while at the same time layering it with enough puns and wit to make it not only palatable, but enjoyable.
I'm not sure how many Emmy's they've managed to win over the past several years (a lot), but I do know they should have at least twice as many as they do now.
I could go on and on and on about how much I love The Daily Show, but I'll skip right to my point.
I was watching the show last night and Stewart had a really interesting guest on, an English author named Redmond O'Hanlon (kick-ass name). I've never heard of him before, but from what I gathered, he's a pretty popular writer among the world's hip-elite. And he's damn funny, too. Hilariously funny. He totally stole the show and left Stewart, usually the witty one, in his dust. O'Hanlon's appearance was traditionally British: round, ruddy, and cherubic, with round rimless spectacles, two tufts of white hair, and rather large snow-colored muttonchop sideburns. He had a very likeable appearance, sort of like the archetypal British pint-swiller.
He was on to plug his latest book, Trawler. It's about a crew of commerical deep-sea fishermen who take a trip out to sea at the most dangerous time possible -- during a hurricane. You'd think it was a drama, but in fact it's a hilarious look into the lives of deep-sea fishermen ("trawlers"), their loneliness onboard ship, and their nefarious activities port-side.
I grew up on Ft. Myers Beach, Florida, a seven-mile-long island right off the south-west Gulf coast. I have a special affinity for the mangrove forests and barnacled docks and Indian Mound Keys of Estero... canals, inlets, manatees, rafts of styrofoam... My ex-stepfather, Al, was the manager of a deep-sea fishing marina, and captain of the Tarpon Hunter's Club. He had a beautiful 34-footer, the Summer Love II, which we used to take to the Florida Keys during the summers to hunt lobster. Al was a deep-sea fisherman, all his buddies were deep-sea fishermen, and I grew up around boats, marinas, docks, and water. I've known shrimpers, dock-wallopers, chum-cutters, bait-sellers, and boat mechanics. They all have a story to tell.
Anyway, that's why this book, Trawler sounds so interesting.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com:
Bad trips are the best. Would you rather watch a home movie of the perfect holiday or hear how it all unraveled? For hardcore fans of wretched travel, Redmond O'Hanlon is as reliable as Imodium. An erudite English writer, expert in natural history, he's known for jungle misadventures whose very titles -- No Mercy, In Trouble Again -- promise biblical woe: leeches, vipers, malaria, piranhas. Where other travelers relish olives in the Tuscan sun, O'Hanlon sucks eyeballs out of monkey skulls in the Amazon.
Trawler, O'Hanlon's latest, begins with characteristic masochism. The study-bound writer decides he must take the worst boat ride on Earth -- aboard a commercial fishing vessel in the far north Atlantic -- in the worst possible conditions: a winter hurricane. As he leaves his snug Oxfordshire home for the Scottish port of Scrabster, the reader braces for punishing winds, epic seasickness and foul-mouthed fishermen who park gutting knives behind their ears, all of which O'Hanlon delivers with darkly comic effect.
But what separates Trawler from other hellishly funny travelogues is its vision of working conditions so extreme that trauma and shock are routine: simply an occupational hazard. Trawlermen don't just lose their lives with regularity. What they risk losing each time out are their minds.
It "occurred to me that I might be going mad," O'Hanlon writes, sure at one point that he's just spoken to the crew when he was, in fact, asleep with his face in a plate. "It's so frightening," he tells his shipmates, "because I thought I was talking to you!" To which one of them replies: "Oh that . . . we all get that."
Before going mad, O'Hanlon must endure an awful initiation aboard a rusted "death-trap" whose skipper is so deep in debt that he fishes in a hurricane when every other captain stays in. O'Hanlon, overweight and over-aged at 51 (he could be father to most of the crew), instantly gets sick, flops into walls and gores his palms while gutting fish. The only calm, of sorts, comes in his turbulent bunk or in the stifling galley, where the men tuck into haggis, fried pizza and fried Mars bars. His shipmates also offer O'Hanlon soothing advice. As one puts it: "The weather! Who cares? You either die or you don't -- and you die all together."
Most sea tales suffer from romance. In Trawler, there's none. The rare view of ocean is menacing, not majestic: a wall of icy froth and dark water that's as claustrophobic as the gutting room where O'Hanlon spends almost all his time, assisting a marine biologist named Luke. Through him, we meet the phantasmagoric array of creatures the trawler's nets drag up from the deep: rabbit fish, sea-bat, snotfish and the hagfish, which suffocates its prey with slime and bores up the anuses of drowned sailors. As amusing and educational as much of this is, readers who prefer their fish battered or grilled may tire of Luke's exhaustive dissections.
The book's human specimens are more enthralling. Trawler, at its best, reads like a black-box transcription of minds trying to stay afloat while crushed by remorseless labor, cold, stress, sleep loss and fear of sudden death. "Your body thinks there's a battle on, and so it's packed you full of adrenalin," Luke says, a few days out. "So the brain tries to order itself for survival, to sort its memories, to clear itself for action by talking instead of dreaming." What results isn't conversation; it's manic, stream-of-subconscious outbursts from the psychic depths. After a week, things get worse. "The brain, memories, pictures, they shut down, they go all dead and dark, they don't care any more," Luke says. "You'll see! We'll be unable to speak. Zombies!"
O'Hanlon is just the man to guide us through this meltdown. A Prozac-quaffing depressive who once wrote of ingesting a jungle hallucinogen called yoppo, he knows the bad-trip sensation of watching his own mind unhinge. "I've never felt like this before," he jabbers at Luke. "The boss, the organizer, you know, the internal tough guy that we sometimes resent and always obey, the Mister Big who directs our thoughts, Luke -- he's gone! He's ceased to exist!" O'Hanlon also contrasts the fear he feels in stormy seas with his fleeting terror in the jungle of arrows and machetes: "this, this massively weighted indifferent murderous pounding all about us -- there's no romance about it, nothing personal," he writes. "And it doesn't stop, it goes on and on. "
And so does O'Hanlon. His fevered, exclamatory prose and Tom Wolfe-like bursts -- "wop!" "pow!" "ping!" "zap!" -- suit the lunacy of his trip. So do the high-octane confessionals that run for pages, broken only by the occasional "aye" uttered by whoever is listening. But this kind of writing loses flavor at book-length. Ultimately, O'Hanlon overcooks an intense but brief adventure of two weeks or so that would have been fresher with a third of its contents filleted.
The nonstop talk in Trawler -- Luke and O'Hanlon banter for whole chapters like mad dons in an Oxford dining hall -- also can't be read as strictly nonfictional. Most of it occurs while the author is frantically gutting fish in wild seas with so much noise that everyone shouts. O'Hanlon is so deranged by fatigue that his rational mind barely works. Yet he repeatedly renders, verbatim, rapid-fire and pitch-perfect monologues of several thousand words, often laced with Orkney and Shetland dialect, on subjects as knotted as European Union fishing quotas and sexual selection by hedge sparrows. This simply isn't credible, and it needlessly camouflages O'Hanlon's virtuosity. He should have taken long passages out of quote marks to make it clear they're filtered through his supple intellect and ear for language.
Trawler nonetheless paints a memorable and unexpectedly tender portrait of men who perform one of the world's most demanding jobs. In the end, even the ship's rock-solid first mate falls apart, confiding that he weeps each time he returns to his wife and worries that he'll lose her by loving her too much. Then there's Robbie, who boards the trawler bandaged after a drunken brawl his last night ashore. Mid-storm, he describes the loveliest passage of his young life: a jail stay for decking two cops in a pub. "Prison -- I'm telling you, marvelous! A holiday! A hotel for trawlermen!" Robbie exclaims. In the brig, he enjoyed regular food and sleep and, incredibly, "No cold at all." The idyll ended prematurely when he was released for good behavior. They "owed me three full months!" he indignantly concludes.
By the time Trawler docks, the reader knows exactly how Robbie felt.
Reviewed by Tony Horwitz
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved
So when TV news is injected with a shot of fresh comedy, it comes as sweet relief. Somehow, John Stewart manages to deliver apocalptic news each and every night (all of it factual) while at the same time layering it with enough puns and wit to make it not only palatable, but enjoyable.
I'm not sure how many Emmy's they've managed to win over the past several years (a lot), but I do know they should have at least twice as many as they do now.
I could go on and on and on about how much I love The Daily Show, but I'll skip right to my point.
I was watching the show last night and Stewart had a really interesting guest on, an English author named Redmond O'Hanlon (kick-ass name). I've never heard of him before, but from what I gathered, he's a pretty popular writer among the world's hip-elite. And he's damn funny, too. Hilariously funny. He totally stole the show and left Stewart, usually the witty one, in his dust. O'Hanlon's appearance was traditionally British: round, ruddy, and cherubic, with round rimless spectacles, two tufts of white hair, and rather large snow-colored muttonchop sideburns. He had a very likeable appearance, sort of like the archetypal British pint-swiller.
He was on to plug his latest book, Trawler. It's about a crew of commerical deep-sea fishermen who take a trip out to sea at the most dangerous time possible -- during a hurricane. You'd think it was a drama, but in fact it's a hilarious look into the lives of deep-sea fishermen ("trawlers"), their loneliness onboard ship, and their nefarious activities port-side.
I grew up on Ft. Myers Beach, Florida, a seven-mile-long island right off the south-west Gulf coast. I have a special affinity for the mangrove forests and barnacled docks and Indian Mound Keys of Estero... canals, inlets, manatees, rafts of styrofoam... My ex-stepfather, Al, was the manager of a deep-sea fishing marina, and captain of the Tarpon Hunter's Club. He had a beautiful 34-footer, the Summer Love II, which we used to take to the Florida Keys during the summers to hunt lobster. Al was a deep-sea fisherman, all his buddies were deep-sea fishermen, and I grew up around boats, marinas, docks, and water. I've known shrimpers, dock-wallopers, chum-cutters, bait-sellers, and boat mechanics. They all have a story to tell.
Anyway, that's why this book, Trawler sounds so interesting.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com:
Bad trips are the best. Would you rather watch a home movie of the perfect holiday or hear how it all unraveled? For hardcore fans of wretched travel, Redmond O'Hanlon is as reliable as Imodium. An erudite English writer, expert in natural history, he's known for jungle misadventures whose very titles -- No Mercy, In Trouble Again -- promise biblical woe: leeches, vipers, malaria, piranhas. Where other travelers relish olives in the Tuscan sun, O'Hanlon sucks eyeballs out of monkey skulls in the Amazon.
Trawler, O'Hanlon's latest, begins with characteristic masochism. The study-bound writer decides he must take the worst boat ride on Earth -- aboard a commercial fishing vessel in the far north Atlantic -- in the worst possible conditions: a winter hurricane. As he leaves his snug Oxfordshire home for the Scottish port of Scrabster, the reader braces for punishing winds, epic seasickness and foul-mouthed fishermen who park gutting knives behind their ears, all of which O'Hanlon delivers with darkly comic effect.
But what separates Trawler from other hellishly funny travelogues is its vision of working conditions so extreme that trauma and shock are routine: simply an occupational hazard. Trawlermen don't just lose their lives with regularity. What they risk losing each time out are their minds.
It "occurred to me that I might be going mad," O'Hanlon writes, sure at one point that he's just spoken to the crew when he was, in fact, asleep with his face in a plate. "It's so frightening," he tells his shipmates, "because I thought I was talking to you!" To which one of them replies: "Oh that . . . we all get that."
Before going mad, O'Hanlon must endure an awful initiation aboard a rusted "death-trap" whose skipper is so deep in debt that he fishes in a hurricane when every other captain stays in. O'Hanlon, overweight and over-aged at 51 (he could be father to most of the crew), instantly gets sick, flops into walls and gores his palms while gutting fish. The only calm, of sorts, comes in his turbulent bunk or in the stifling galley, where the men tuck into haggis, fried pizza and fried Mars bars. His shipmates also offer O'Hanlon soothing advice. As one puts it: "The weather! Who cares? You either die or you don't -- and you die all together."
Most sea tales suffer from romance. In Trawler, there's none. The rare view of ocean is menacing, not majestic: a wall of icy froth and dark water that's as claustrophobic as the gutting room where O'Hanlon spends almost all his time, assisting a marine biologist named Luke. Through him, we meet the phantasmagoric array of creatures the trawler's nets drag up from the deep: rabbit fish, sea-bat, snotfish and the hagfish, which suffocates its prey with slime and bores up the anuses of drowned sailors. As amusing and educational as much of this is, readers who prefer their fish battered or grilled may tire of Luke's exhaustive dissections.
The book's human specimens are more enthralling. Trawler, at its best, reads like a black-box transcription of minds trying to stay afloat while crushed by remorseless labor, cold, stress, sleep loss and fear of sudden death. "Your body thinks there's a battle on, and so it's packed you full of adrenalin," Luke says, a few days out. "So the brain tries to order itself for survival, to sort its memories, to clear itself for action by talking instead of dreaming." What results isn't conversation; it's manic, stream-of-subconscious outbursts from the psychic depths. After a week, things get worse. "The brain, memories, pictures, they shut down, they go all dead and dark, they don't care any more," Luke says. "You'll see! We'll be unable to speak. Zombies!"
O'Hanlon is just the man to guide us through this meltdown. A Prozac-quaffing depressive who once wrote of ingesting a jungle hallucinogen called yoppo, he knows the bad-trip sensation of watching his own mind unhinge. "I've never felt like this before," he jabbers at Luke. "The boss, the organizer, you know, the internal tough guy that we sometimes resent and always obey, the Mister Big who directs our thoughts, Luke -- he's gone! He's ceased to exist!" O'Hanlon also contrasts the fear he feels in stormy seas with his fleeting terror in the jungle of arrows and machetes: "this, this massively weighted indifferent murderous pounding all about us -- there's no romance about it, nothing personal," he writes. "And it doesn't stop, it goes on and on. "
And so does O'Hanlon. His fevered, exclamatory prose and Tom Wolfe-like bursts -- "wop!" "pow!" "ping!" "zap!" -- suit the lunacy of his trip. So do the high-octane confessionals that run for pages, broken only by the occasional "aye" uttered by whoever is listening. But this kind of writing loses flavor at book-length. Ultimately, O'Hanlon overcooks an intense but brief adventure of two weeks or so that would have been fresher with a third of its contents filleted.
The nonstop talk in Trawler -- Luke and O'Hanlon banter for whole chapters like mad dons in an Oxford dining hall -- also can't be read as strictly nonfictional. Most of it occurs while the author is frantically gutting fish in wild seas with so much noise that everyone shouts. O'Hanlon is so deranged by fatigue that his rational mind barely works. Yet he repeatedly renders, verbatim, rapid-fire and pitch-perfect monologues of several thousand words, often laced with Orkney and Shetland dialect, on subjects as knotted as European Union fishing quotas and sexual selection by hedge sparrows. This simply isn't credible, and it needlessly camouflages O'Hanlon's virtuosity. He should have taken long passages out of quote marks to make it clear they're filtered through his supple intellect and ear for language.
Trawler nonetheless paints a memorable and unexpectedly tender portrait of men who perform one of the world's most demanding jobs. In the end, even the ship's rock-solid first mate falls apart, confiding that he weeps each time he returns to his wife and worries that he'll lose her by loving her too much. Then there's Robbie, who boards the trawler bandaged after a drunken brawl his last night ashore. Mid-storm, he describes the loveliest passage of his young life: a jail stay for decking two cops in a pub. "Prison -- I'm telling you, marvelous! A holiday! A hotel for trawlermen!" Robbie exclaims. In the brig, he enjoyed regular food and sleep and, incredibly, "No cold at all." The idyll ended prematurely when he was released for good behavior. They "owed me three full months!" he indignantly concludes.
By the time Trawler docks, the reader knows exactly how Robbie felt.
Reviewed by Tony Horwitz
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved
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