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By
Published: 2006
Category: Fiction [4]
I've just read a stunning news item: So much of the Arctic ice cover has disappeared “that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe's most northerly outpost to the North Pole itself.” This is, you understand, not ice cover just barely thick enough to skate on, but ice that is normally immune to the relative heat of the Arctic summer --- an area bigger than the British Isles.
This makes “2182 Kilohertz” --- a book set in the Arctic that reeks so much of authenticity I almost felt I ought to wear gloves while I was reading it --- not just fiction but historical fiction. A boat stuck in the Arctic ice? Soon that will be as quaint as Conrad or Melville.
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I'm not much for sea stories, but Malcolm MacPherson [6] --- my only friend who writes red-blooded books, full of adventure and danger --- said this was the best novel he's read in a decade. Good enough for me. And I thought: “Enough Proust. Let's spend a few hours with real men.”
Consumer warning: These guys are real men. In-your-face, bawdy, physically strong and mentally independent. Consider the beginning of the book. After 138 days on a winter drill rig, Henry Seine is now on a camp barge “in frozen anchorage at the trailing end of a gravel causeway that stretched twenty-five miles into the Arctic Ocean.” Cold? The north wind threatens “to make freezer-burned steak out of one side of his face.” Oh, but the Arctic beauty, you think. Not quite: “There, on the ice, looking like a pile of frozen mud laced with toilet tissue, lay five days' accumulation of human sewage.”
Hmm. Not sure if I'm enticing you here. Maybe I should say that Annie Proulx calls this “the best sea story in a long time." And that The New York Times --- prissy to a fault --- named this a notable book. And that David Masiel is not making up this….uh... stuff: From 1980 to 1989, he says, he “worked offshore in the arctic oilfields, sailing on ocean-going tugboats and icebreakers, mostly in Alaskan waters.”
The good news: The characters amaze. You hate some of them, love none of them, but then you learn more about them and you find yourself able to read but not judge. “This kind of complexity,” Masiel has said, “is far closer to the truth of human experience than a thousand lectures on good and evil. Also, it makes a better story.”
No…uh…fooling. A storm makes the barges move out of synch, and suddenly you're learning more about boats in winter water than you planned to in your life. You find out what happens to a man thrown overboard. About the dangers of a leaky bilge. About walking on a man-made island. And dozens of truths about the oil business they don't show you in those lovely commercials about rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
Imbedded here is a love story, a contrast in passion and ice. And a crazy, daring rescue --- the title refers to the radio frequency used at sea to broadcast emergencies. Death? There's more than enough to go around. Redemption? Hey, this is a sea story --- no redemption, no point.
Like moving through icy water, this book can be slow, hard reading. But it's oddly rewarding. Know a guy who likes Clancy and Patterson and that legion of writers who write tough but probably put on galoshes just to get the newspaper? Lay “2182 Kilohertz” on him.
To buy “2182 Kilohertz” from Amazon.com, click here. [7]