Book Reviews
WE, THE DROWNED, by Carsten Jensen
The Times, May 2010
The sea has always had a mysterious influence on men, tugging them away from their humdrum, land-bound moorings and into a heroic unknown where they can grapple alone with destiny. The power of that outward tide is memorably described in Melville’s Moby Dick by its narrator, Ishmael, watching men in the “insular city of the Manhattoes, [where], right and left, the streets take you waterward. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. What do you see?- Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.”
Melville is only one of many writers whose heroes have sailed waters beyond the maps, encountered the monsters of the depths, and come back, older and wiser, to tell the tale. Men have been writing about the intoxication of sea travel since, in the dawn of history, Homer put Odysseus under sail in a wine-dark Mediterranean. From Conrad to Stevenson to Hemingway to the Pirates of the Caribbean children’s films, stories about seamen leaving land lives and wives behind to overcome the terrors of the Other through courage (and sometimes guile) go on giving us our most stirring, and male, literature.
Carsten Jensen’s spell-binding “We, The Drowned,” spanning four generations in the life of the Danish port town of Marstal, is a magnificent addition to the canon of seafaring writing. As carefully plotted as a ship’s course steered by starlight, as full of manly vitality and violence as a brawl on board, yet modern enough in its sensibilities to be tender without mawkishness too, it’s a brilliant new reworking of the ancient theme.
Jensen’s enormous saga follows Laurids Madsen, who got his sea legs in an 1848 battle which flew him up off the deck of a stricken ship until he saw St Peter’s bare arse – but brought him back down again to tell the story, still wearing his big wood-soled boots. It follows Albert Madsen, his son, who, in the same boots, sets off a generation later to find his vanished father, and tracks him down at the other end of the world, gone native in the balmy south, with a taste for palm wine and a new crop of children. It follows the fate of Knud Erik, the son of a drowned sailor, who’s befriended by an older Albert, (now a wealthy ship broker but a man who’s lost his respect for his father, so can’t quite bring himself to love). Unusually for a sea novel, Jensen also interests himself in a woman – Knud Erik’s mother, Klara Friis, who inherits Albert’s money, and resolves to use it to save the men of Marstal from the sea by destroying the town’s shipping business. Later still, he takes a new generation to the bitter end of World War Two.
The connection between all these elements is the brilliant and unusual use of the first person plural as the book’s narrative voice – “we,” the townspeople, boys, Shrove Tuesday revelers, mourners, whoever, hanging around the shore, generation after generation, soaking up the scraps of story washed in on the tide, and, by listening, sharing, and sometimes improving them, turning them into the shared history that all Marstal will remember. For what binds these people together, in whatever port or hold they wind up, is their sense of themselves as Marstallers – the stories they share.
Jensen’s good on Conrad-esque cabin low-life: the roughness of the odd sorts from everywhere who rub up together in the docks, the seamy sophistication of men who know the brothels of Buenos Aires and the South Seas, yet whose hopes, and bravado, are still oddly innocent. “’Make way for a Dane with his life, his soul and his seabag!’ yelled Claus Jacob Clausen. He was a small, sinewy man who liked to boast that a Copenhagen tattoo artist called Frederik the Spike had once told him he had the toughest arm he’d ever stuck a needle into.”
You get something of the lyricism of magical realism, too, and not just in Klara Friis’s grand dream. The pages glow with wonderfully imagined pictures: the colonialist who dreams of turning a lush South Sea paradise into a landscape of neat lines, and succeeds; late-night cabin conversations with the shrunken head of Captain Cook. There’s a bargain with Fate: Albert, quietly dying on a becalmed ship, half-smothered in a cloud of butterflies, throwing a bag of stolen pearls back into the sea and being rewarded with the return of his soul, and enough wind to get to safety. The later Albert can no longer make bargains: he’s tormented by prophetic dreams of familiar boys’ deaths in a war no one yet knows is coming.
There’s brutality and sin galore: lashings, blood, guts, humiliations, betrayals and horrible death on practically every page. Yet the language is all you could hope for in a sea novel: sinewy and simple, often surprisingly beautiful, often full of tongue-in-cheek laughter.
The real magic of this narrative, however, is the story it tells of the relationship between fathers and sons. Distant fathers, necessarily, whose place in their sons’ lives is all too often taken by bullying strangers or chance love objects, but who nevertheless transmit to their wild boys the obsessive awareness that the great adventure, and true manhood, are to be found out on the waters. Mothers who want to break that bond do so at their peril, as Klara Friis discovers. But there might be no need to try. For the strange and beautiful resolution Jensen offers – a fragile but redemptive hope – refers back to a theme that’s been prefigured throughout the book.
Despite their passion for the sea, the Marstal men are not, when it comes to it, so very different from the women they leave. They too love their community, want it to prosper, and dream of returning to join the rest of the “we,” chewing over the events they’ve been part of. “He was no patriot, nor was he the opposite. He took life as it came,” Jensen writes of Laurids Madsen. “His horizon was one of mast tops, mill wings and the ridged turret on the church: the skyline of Marstal, viewed from the sea.”
ENDS