The sea has always been a powerful stimulant for the literary imagination, most famously, of course, for the likes of Messrs Hemingway and Melville. Both, indeed, are name-checked in Monique Roffey’s novel Archipelago, a new addition to the canon of ocean-inspired work, taking the trope of the waters and recasting it for the twenty-first century.
Gavin Weald has had his family torn apart by a flood, his Trinidad house ruined and, worse still, losing his son and seeing his wife incapacitated. He is left alone with his six-year-old daughter, Océan, to try and rebuild a life. At the start of the novel he returns to his refurbished house but realizes he can’t yet face the site of his tragedy. Instead, he bundles his daughter into the car, stocks up on supplies and sets sail in his boat Romany. He embarks on perhaps the oldest novelistic device, the journey for personal salvation, starting (as shown in a map) at Port of Spain and finishing at the Galapagos Islands; a voyage almost picaresque in its lack of engineered suspense but all the richer for its personal and emotional drama.
Indeed, the novel is unabashed about tackling deep subjects. During the voyage Gavin ponders the nature of the Old World and the New World, the consequences of slavery and most powerfully the relationship between the natural world and the human one. He is floored by the realization that the flood that killed his son ‘was random, a rare occurrence’, that it ‘had no meaning…a catastrophe to him and meant nothing to nature’. How can man and nature be reconciled? Towards the end, while swimming, Gavin wonders how Darwin could see ‘no art’ or ‘divine alchemy’ in the sight of the Galapagan skies ‘choked with frigates…forty or fifty flying through the air’; he too tells his wife at the end that ‘I thought I was separate. Me against the world…But really, I’m part of it all, the earth, the sea’. No easy answers are fixed upon, just alternatives entertained.
Such themes are couched in intriguingly casual prose. I must admit to groaning slightly when encountering the absence of speech marks alongside faddish present-tense narration. But any doubts were soon dispelled. The writing accretes a charm of its own, a loose-limbed quality that looks deceptively artless but is thus all the more nightmarish to achieve. In particular, Roffey is master of the sly-but-deadly simile: whether it’s islands ‘like…a lake of upturned toothbrushes’, their boat ‘hurrying alone…like an old lady moving in heavy skirts’ or ‘high-rise buildings’ standing ‘like a crowd of glittery partygoers’. Not to mention her ability with the deft but devastating verb: ‘the rain shakes down in a slow haze’. Neither showy nor anaemic, it is perfectly pitched.
Admittedly fifty pages or so could possibly have been trimmed from the middle without too great a loss, and some of the incremental repetition pared slightly. But it is hard to begrudge much in a novel that is so constantly beguiling. With its mix of lightly-worn philosophy, masterly prose and painfully real characterization, it is an inventive and thought-provoking work. Along his journey Gavin ‘is learning how to walk again’. It is a pleasure to watch him try.
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