The Perfect Storm

Sebastian Junger

First rule of holiday reading: You read something connected to the place you are visiting. Second rule: If you're staying in a hotel or holiday cottage and they offer a decent library for guests then, perversely, you read one of their books instead of selecting from the pile of books you brought with you.

Which is how I came to be reading our accomodation's copy of The Perfect Storm a couple of weeks ago in Newlyn. Newlyn is the largest fishing port south of the Scottish border and the only town left in Cornwall where fishing is still more important than tourism. I remember Jimmy Goldsmith launched the Referendum Party election campaign in this most remote corner of England in 1997 and now I can see why. It has the feel of a town and an industry under threat. But there's still a sizeable trawler fleet based here and along the shoreline there's a mile or so of warehousing and processing units. The town's only tourist attraction is a museum dedicated to pilchards.

The fishing port which features so heavily Sebastian Junger's book is Gloucester on the North-East coast of the United States. Like Newlyn it's a town built on fish. The Perfect Storm deals with the loss of the Andrea Gail, a ship belonging to Gloucester's swordfishing fleet, in the 1991 storm off the coast of Newfoundland. A third of the book describes the relationship between a boat and its port - how difficult it is for loved ones left behind for as much as a month - and how the week or two of shore leave is often an orgy of drinking and spending. The rest of the book is the story of the storm and an attempt by Junger to work out how, where and when the Andrea Gail was lost. It contains a powerful description of what it is like to drown at sea - in as much as someone who hasn't experienced it is able to describe it - which is really quite a difficult and claustrophic few pages of reading.

One of the appealing features of the book is the author's promise in the introduction that he intends it to be utterly factual. The unknowable last thoughts of the crew are not imagined and no dialogue is invented. Junger hasn't made it easy on himself. It turns out surprisingly little is recorded of the last few hours on the Andrea Gail, no Mayday was sent, and the emergency beacon which is supposed to be activated automatically when a boat is sinking was never activated. Junger's solution to this absence of material is to cover the stories of some of the other vessels which got into trouble that same night. To a certain extent, however, the book loses its focus when it isn't concentrating on the Andrea Gail and her crew.

The Perfect Storm has something of Krakauer's Into Thin Air about it. As in Into Thin Air it reminds us that in large parts of our seemingly safe and cosy planet quite ordinary people, if luck and the weather turn against them, can quickly get into fatal difficulties. And with not the slightest hope of rescue.