Trawler (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Deviating from his usual excursions into the world's rainforests, O'Hanlon (No Mercy) finagles his way onto a Scottish deep-sea fishing boat headed into the North Atlantic waters in January, "the very worst time of year," when storm winds are at their most forceful. The captain and crew seem to like O'Hanlon well enough, even if he is a "mad, seasick writer who's no use to anyone," prone to staring off into the distance when he gets distracted by his thoughts, and he conveys a genuine affection for them as he records their stories. Since there's little to do aboard the ship other than help his marine biologist friend catalogue the various fishes they pull up, and no real scenery to describe besides the wind and the rain, O'Hanlon gets into one long conversation after another—or maybe just one long conversation with intermittent interruptions, as a certain degree of sameness creeps in. O'Hanlon and his shipmates are equally excitable, especially under their sleep-deprived conditions, leading to dialogue peppered with exclamation points and fevered theories about near-total homosexuality within the 19th-century British navy and the possibility that women find trawlermen attractive because fish smell like human pheromones. Though the unrelenting, incongruous manic tone may be off-putting to newcomers, fans of O'Hanlon's trouble-filled sagas will feel right at home. Photos, illus. not seen by PW.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 US Ed edition (January 4, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400042755
• ISBN-13: 978-1400042753
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #815,056 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Five stars or no star?, February 1, 2005

By	Manfred - See all my reviews

So you've noticed. Some reviewers give enthusiastic accolades, while others seem to denounce it. But why such polarized views?

This is where the "expectation" can ruin your appetite. It is probably safe to say that Trawler by Redmond O'Hanlon is a unique and unusual read for everyone. The book could have discussed a plethora of political, economical and ecological issues surrounding Scottish fishing industry. Or could the scholastic O'Hanlon have delved into the biology of deep sea fauna. Each of such approaches would have led to a great story, but as it is, Trawler is about something else.

O'Hanlon chose to limit himself to what had actually happened aboard a commercial trawler out in the frigid North Atlantic. He decided to focus on a handful of unfamiliar experiences that made his trip very special; the relentless weather and the incessant physical labors, the severe sleep deprivation, the encyclopedic knowledge displayed by a young biology student on the ship and the curious comradeship (or shall we say, the shipmateship) among the rough, hard-talking crews.

The horrific weather is evident throughout the book; the simplest move is with utmost difficulty. And the first casualty is, of course, the author's GI tract. There is very little sense of time passing, which testifies to the hectic but monotonous nature of the trade. But most importantly, it is the sense of sleep deprivation (miserable brain malfunction) that O'Hanlon succeeds most in conveying; the bombardment of non-stop, uncontrollable, loosely structured sentences. A big chaos. A real stream-of-consciousness. But he manages to stop short of becoming gibberish. Yes, there are numerous chaotic passages, but they are there to help the (mock) experience of the reader. With all these, Trawler still manages to be informative; Greenland halibut and Orange roughy (critically overfished in the North Atlantic; try to avoid them at grocery store), a fear of becoming uxorious (being overly fond of one's wife) and the concept of sexual selection and alpha mates (O'Hanlon seems to be obsessed with this).

O'Hanlon has an aloof sense of humor but is also poignant at a few key moments. Overall, it is an entertaining read. About two-thirds into the book, at the height of this all-neurons-gone-haywire, O'Hanlon's conversation with one of the most rugged shipmates of all, Robbie, reaches a revelation; the reason why he approached this book in the way he did. A good effort.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Bad case of sleep-deprived testosterone poisoning, January 13, 2005

By	J. A. Smith "jas5068" (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I usually like O'Hanlon's books...I usually can't put them down. But this one...well, I'm just not sure I like it at all. Written in what O'Hanlon, I'm sure, thinks is a style akin to the sleep-deprived ramblings he must have encountered on the trawler, the book instead veers into incoherence and becomes only annoying. Revelations only work if you feel some sympathy and identification with the speaker and I found the speakers, with one exception, highly uninteresting and unsympathetic. Only big Bryan held my interest and I wanted to hear more from him.
I found myself heartily sick of Luke, the walk-on-water marine biologist...he was like an orchestra work comprised of one note, played over and over and over. Jason the skipper...same thing. O'Hanlon invests them with a false nobility that just grates on the nerves after awhile.
I can't recommend this book, but I heartily recommend O'Hanlon's other works.

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Glad He Went There Instead of Me., February 10, 2005

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Since reading the stories of the U-Boats and convoys in the North Atlantic in the middle of winter I've always wanted to see what it was like.

This book cured me of any possible thoughts I might have had about actually doing something about it.

Apparently the author had some of the same ideas. Unlike me he actually did something about it. I'm glad he did, now I don't have to. I learned from him that I especially do not want to go see the North Atlantic on a fishing trawler.

The book is kind of strange in its way of writing. But I think he was trying to capture the actual nature of the conversations being conducted by sleep deprived men. He couldn't write this way, he couldn't think this way normally and be the successful author he is. I think that writing like this shows a lot more talent than the normal travelogue.

This is a book that will make you think strange thoughts as you look at a piece of fish on your plate. If you want a book on going strange places, this is clearly the one.