Customer Reviews

In Hazard: Four Days of Terror at Sea

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For years, I have been a big fan of Richard Hughes' book A High Wind in Jamaica. When I had a chance to read the newly republished In Hazard (1938) through Librarything's Early Reviewers program, I was thrilled. Unfortunately, I am not able to report on the new introduction by John Crowley, (author of Little, Big) since that was not included in the advance uncorrected proof.
Hughes has framed this compelling tale with a carefully researched account of a ship that was caught in, and dragged by, a hurricane over several days time, barely remaining afloat and soon without any power. Arranging the story by day over one week's time, we come to know how dependent parts of a ship's operating system are with all other parts and areas of the ship. The specific details of ship handling and construction were enthralling and horrifying. Into the frame, Hughes has inserted his characters, officers, engineers, Chinese stokers, a young seaman. Each of these becomes very real, and very individual, to the reader. The combination of the terrible storm, its effects on the ship and the men and the suspense of how, and if, the ship will survive make enthralling reading. Men act better, or worse, that you would expect under trials such as these. When you remember that the book came out just before World War II, it really makes you think about all the endangered men at sea in that conflict and what they had to undergo.
I recommend this book without reservation. The reader will gain a great deal of interesting information, and many things to ponder in the lives and interactions of human beings. The sudden event at the end was shocking to me, but I can see how it relates to the very beginning of the book, and makes the whole stronger.

The SUNDAY TIMES was right: IN HAZARD is a tremendous piece of narrative description. It's one of the finest sea stories ever written--as shocking as THE PERFECT STORM, and even better written.

The weather was building, but the captain felt almost no concern at all. His freighter was no ordinary ship, and the hurricane season was past. Surely, he was facing no more than a fall gale in tropical waters.

What he was actually facing was one of the most powerful ocean storms ever recorded. By Wednesday, the ship was experiencing a full hurricane. On Thursday, the barometer would fall to 26.99 mb and the winds would be blowing 200 knots. That's when the horror began. During the ensuing days, the wind and the sea were about to perform feats no living sailor had ever seen before. Read this book!

This is a "cracking good" sea story about a ship caught up in a hurricane and unable to escape. These people are having a bad time! The writing transcends the subject matter. Read it if you can find it

I really enjoy novels about the sea, so was happy to learn about this little known classic. In clean, straightforward prose Hemingway might have admired, readers are introduced to the Archimedes, a steam ship beginning a cruise from North America to China. Weather intervenes and the ship and its crew are caught up in a deadly storm that severely tests their hearts and their will for four days. Much of the novel is an excellent narration of ship and crew in dire circumstances, but as the novel progresses different storms are adumbrated: storms of historical circumstance, storms of memory and experience, that add psychological and political depth to the work.

Readers who have enjoyed Melville and Conrad should find much to like here.

This is a 'ripping yarn' type of book that tells the story of the crew of the tanker ship 'Archimedes' and their struggle to save themselves and their ship in the midst of a freakish hurricane. The writing and storytelling are quite good and it's an easy, enjoyable read. However, I would strongly suggest that you avoid reading the introduction - at least until you've finished reading the book - as the person who wrote it decided to reveal one of the more significant plot twists. I've come across this sort of woeful inconsideration of the reader more than once in an introductin and I do not get it. So let the reader beware!

In Hazard is about the capacity of mankind to cope with overwhelming challenges and believe in its future against dreadful odds. It is a thrilling, sobering, and masterfully written book--but it is worth its price just for the account of the storm, whose winds will never quite die out in the mind of the reader.

In what must be some of the most horrific accounts of strom conditions at sea, In Hazard blasts you in the face with vivid tales of monster waves, blistering winds and the freighter snared in their grasp. As the days of relentless horror pass on board the freighter, the author delves deep into the lives of the men trying to survive the hurricane. Unfortunately, he abandons his gripping description of the storm for a meandering inventory of the survivors' thoughts.

Thrilled by the 5-star Reader's Digest condensed version, I ordered the complete novel thinking that more Richard Hughes could only be better, right?

Wrong.

The condensed version completely eliminated the anticlimactic ending, well described by another reviewer here as "In Hazard peters out like the storm it documents" along with the utterly pointless death of one of the heroes, and it cut out a good deal of a nasty little subplot apparently designed to emphasize the dimwitted anti-Chinese racism of the British crew.

What a disappointment.

In Hazard by Richard Hughes falls neatly into some of the "man vs." plot categories: man vs. nature, man vs. technology with a little man vs. himself tossed in for good measure. It tells the story of a British cargo ship, the Archimedes, caught in a seemingly endless hurricane as the ship makes for the Panama Canal from the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.

The story, set in 1929, takes place between the two world wars, and, in fact, was originally published in 1938. The current publication is a re-release as part of New York Review of Books' Classics series. As Hughes says in an afterword written years after the initial publication, "the fading smell of remembered death in Britain was just beginning to be replaced by a new stench that was death prefigured."

If it weren't for Hughes' afterword, it would be easy for AP English teachers to seize on the book as an metaphor for the onset of World War II. The Archimedes caught helplessly in the storm even though some signs of the disaster were evident. The British ship eventually rescued by an American vessel. Hughes denies the allegory, saying his book is symbol, which is "never concerned primarily with the future qua future but with a much more timeless kind of truth."

The book is almost too neatly divided in half. The first half all plot and storm; the second, character development. For a modern reader accustomed to getting these two simultaneously, the book can be a difficult read. It takes a few chapters to feel comfortable with the mid-20th century writing.

The ship is the main character of the first half. The reader is taken on a tour of the vessel and its technologic advances explained in detail, along with explanations of where and how the cargo is stowed and hints of the tensions between the crew and officers, the English and Chinese, the engine room staff and the above-deck staff. Characters seem interchangeable at this point. When the storm hits and the ship's technology disabled, it's easy to lose track of what petty officer is doing what. But by this point, the ship in peril story has captured the reader's attention and moves quickly. Hughes' describes the events beautifully. When the ship reaches the eye of the hurricane, it becomes the only "land" for countless birds and insects. As the crew emerges to survey the damage to the ship, "[t]he officers were barefoot, and as they walked they kept stepping on live birds--they could not help it. I don't want to dwell on this, but I must tell you what things were like, and be done with it. You would feel the delicate skeleton scrunch under your feet: but you could not help it, and the gummed feathers hardly fluttered.

No bird, even crushed, or half-crushed, cried."

As the Archimedes is pulled back into the storm, the book abruptly changes. Detailed back stories and interior monologues for a junior officer and a Chinese laborer take center stage. The change in focus is jarring. If the character information had come earlier or been woven into the story of the storm, it could have been appreciated and helped to move the overall story forward. If the back stories had focused on the chief engineer who is central to the first and last sentences of the book, it may have worked better. As it is, the effect pulls the reader out of the story and feels an unnecessary interruption as the reader just wants to find out if and how the Archimedes survives.

Once the character pieces are finished, the rest of the book feels like an extended denouement. The storm ends; the American ship appears. It's another fast change from the slow pace of the character information.

The problems with tone and pacing could be a product of the 70-year time difference between the original and current release. Each half of the book could be a fine read on its own. It's the harsh combination that creates problems.

I was expecting to love this book, but sadly it's a very inferior version of the "man against nature" survival-adventure story. As Virgina Woolf said about it, between the storm and the human characters "there's a gap in which there's some want of strength", and there's also some unclear and unexciting plot developments, made more confusing by the boring, indistinguishable characters. Moreover, it's not only dated in its romanticising of the courageous seamen (not to mention the female fantasy object) but actually racist in its depiction of the "Chinamen" working the ship ("shooting is naught to a Chinaman...they canna feel pain", ) despite the author's attempt to tell a tragic backstory about one of these "Chinamen" (which mostly serves to emphasise "communism" as an evil state of affairs leading to mutiny). Much better books in this ship-adventure genre are A Perfect Storm, GG Marquez's Diary of a Shipwrecked Sailor and of course Alfred Lansing's Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage