All At Sea

a whale, a shipwreck, a love story

Hello B+Bs! I am preparing to interview the performance poet Vanessa Kisuule this evening about her debut work of non-fiction Neverland: The Pleasures and Perils of Fandom and my brain is full of knotty thoughts about idolatry, morality, community, rehabilitation, art, trauma, humanity… I’ll share more on this, next week.

In other news, my copy of Intermezzo has just arrived. (In an orchestra, an intermezzo is a short piece connecting two larger pieces, which is a metaphor for an interlude in life. I like it!) This interview - where a delightfully personable Sally Rooney reveals that she’s shifted from mandating privacy for her characters, as if they were real people, to allowing the reader access to their interior world - makes me think that her fourth novel might sate me in a way Beautiful World did not. More on that, and Elizabeth Strout’s new one, which features both Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge (one of my absolute favourite characters in fiction) soon.

Until then: a thought-provoking work of non-fiction I want to plant in my gardens of recommendations - a sort of vegetable patch, really - which you may already be familiar with, as it was on lots of newspaper reading lists this summer.

vg cover

Maurice and Maralyn is a true story of shipwreck, survival and marriage, recounted by the journalist Sophie Elmhirst. A childfree couple living in suburbin Derby in the early 1970s, Maurice and Maralyn long for escape. Everyone around them is climbing the career ladder and having babies, but they don’t care about or want for any of that. “The cyclical work of a home wasn’t enough [for Maralyn]” observe her parents. “She liked to push the limits of things.”

A more generous reading of Maralyn is that she craves adventure. Maurice, 9 years his wife’s senior, is also looking to abscond. But his desire for escape is motivated by his inability to navigate modern life, as much as it is a desire for adventure. Unlike his wife, Maurice has never mastered social niceties, or the art of friendship - how to be a person living amongst other people. They are a surprising couple to their peers, more notable for their differences than their similarities. Even Maurice, when he meets Maralyn - who is as gregarious and charismatic as he is blunt and awkward - cannot imagine that she would want to be with him:

“Maurice is sure she must have other suitors. Her life was just beginning to open out. Maurice, nearly thirty, had narrowed his to a dark flat and a low opinion of himself. Loneliness had closed around him like a case.”

But Maralyn does want him - not least because he can fly planes and sail boats, both of which facilitate the adventure she craves. Shifting his loneliness to one side, Maralyn encases Maurice.

Seven years into their marriage, Maurice and Maralyn sell their house. They put all of the money into building a 31 foot yacht, by hand. It takes them 2 years to complete, with every evening and weekend spent labouring on the boat. The couple are loners, writes Elmhirst. They don’t socialise. They have already escaped in their minds and they focuse solely and entirely on the physical means to do so. They name the boat Auralyn and in June 1972, she sets sail from Southampton, bound for New Zealand. The couple have planned their route meticulously, right down to their rations - every snack, every half biscuit, jotted down by Maralyn. They are half way to New Zealand, when they crash into a whale.

“A crack, a jolt, the sound of a gun going off… The noise split the air. Books leapt of their shelves. Cutlery flew. They thought of their boat as their child. To hear her wood tear and splinter was like hearing the pained scream of an infant.”

Auralyn sinks within the hour. Maurice and Maralyn escape onto the boat’s raft and are cast adrift on the Pacific Ocean for almost 4 months - with only 3 weeks worth of water and canned food to sustain them. Against the extraordinary odds, they survive. Their resourcefulness is efficiently but meticulously detailed by Elmhirst: relentless, brutal, frequently stomach-churning. At one point, they are forced to eat rotting, raw turtle meat. In another sweet, near hallucinatory moment, Maralyn wonders if a large turtle might be able to pull the raft along, like a horse and carriage.

The book plays beautifully with the notion of ‘survival’ - it is not just a physical thing, but an emotional pulse, too. For almost the whole book, Maurice and Maralyn are unobserved by anyone else. Which makes this passage, when the couple are finally rescued by a Korean tuna ship - after many agonising near misses, as flares fail to light - particularly striking. By this point, they have been stranded at sea for 117 days - a lifetime. The Korean ship has been at sea for two and a half years - a different kind of purgatory. Maurice and Maralyn barely resemble human beings. They cannot speak, or walk. They smell so bad that the crew throws everything over the side of the boat, stripping the ragged, rotting clothes from their infected backs.

“Once they’d returned to their blanket, [the ship’s captain] Suh watched the woman pat-dry her hair, a practised gesture she must have performed a thousand times in the comfort of a bedroom. She crawled over to their heap of things and dug out a comb. Sitting close to the man, she started combing his hair, then stroked his cheek.

The crew felt quiet. Suh felt a pain in his chest, which he decided was heartache. Perhaps it was the years away from home, the years without touch of intimacy, the sight of a wife’s kindness, a small but deliberate act of care. He hadn’t seen or felt anything like it for so long. It must have been this tenderness, he thought, that kept them alive.”

I don’t often read tales of real-life survival, but I read a lot of books about relationships, so while I found the action parts at sea compelling, the really tender bits - that left me emotionally water-logged, if you will - was the exploration of Maurice and Maralyn’s marriage, and what it was like, when the media dust had settled, to return to a place that was no longer home. They had sold their home, to build a new one on the water, which was now at the bottom of the ocean. Their escape has failed. Their desire has turned to ash. They were irrevocably changed by their near-death - for what? What comes next?

Notes Elmhirst poignantly, we will all have a moment where our desire turns to ash. Where we look at one another and at our boat - metaphorical or otherwise and think - what next?

“Somewhere, deep within, unspoken, we must know, we do know, that we’ll all have our time adrift. For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?”

Elmhirst is a long-form writer for The New Yorker and The Guardian (I interviewed her earlier this year about tradwives) and her book reads like a long(er) long-read. (In journalistic terms, btw, long-form/ a long-read, is anything over 5,000 words, up to about 20,000.) Maurice and Maralyn is an ideal gift for a friend or family who likes incredible true stories of survival, preferably ones told at a clip. But it’s also a book about love and hubris. And in that sense, it’s a book for us all.