My most recent reading was an intriguing novel about a ship voyage. This book reminded me of other titles about journeys of various sorts.
18th Century French Expedition
Landfalls, a first novel from Naomi J. Williams, is marvelous and inventive. Williams takes as her subject the doomed expedition of two French frigates, Boussole and Astrolabe, which set sail in 1785 to circle the globe and discover new lands and new species. As the title aptly suggests, the chapters are more about the places Laperouse and his crew anchor and visit than their sea voyage. Williams has done an incredible amount of research into the historical facts, but her novel is as much or more about the inner journeys of selected crew members and the ship captains, Count de Laperouse and Viscount de Langle, and their encounters with the natives in Chile, Alaska, and the South Pacific.
There is tenderness and wit mixed with loneliness and grief. The piling up of points of view of the savants (naturalists on board) and other crew members and, occasionally, of those left behind, adds texture, variety and richness to what in a lesser author might have been a more straightforward account.
Science & Nature
Sir Joseph Banks puts in an appearance in Landfalls, and there are also references to Captain Cook’s famous earlier voyage. These men brought to mind two other works I have enjoyed: Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, a nonfiction study by Richard Holmes, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s voluminous novel about an early female botanist, The Signature of All Things. Each in its way has something to say about the joy of discovery and the thrill of the quest.
Other Voyages
Voyages can be physical ones or emotional, interior ones. Two favorite books are a novel by Deborah Weisgall and a memoir by Sarah Saffian. Weisgall’s The World Before Her takes us to Venice for the story of two marriages colored by art, one that of Marian Evans (aka George Eliot) to the much younger John Cross, and the other that of contemporary sculptor Caroline Springold who is celebrating her 10th wedding anniversary. I found this a very satisfying book in the best sense–the sights and smells of this canal city played out against the shifting emotions of the two women. In contrast, Ithaka is Saffian’s account of being found by her birth mother and the emotional toll of anxiety, angst and confusion it wrought before there was acceptance. This is a heartrending internal journey.
Photo credit: www.classic-sailing.co/uk/destinations/fiji-sailing
