New Book: David Masiel, The Western Limit of the World

[scrappypunk]

The secret sharers

David Masiel's vivid storytelling makes 'The Western Limit of the World' an intense seafaring adventure story

Reviewed by James Leigh
December 25, 2005



In "The Western Limit of the World," David Masiel has produced a sea adventure for the 21st century that can stand next to the work of any such novel from the 19th or 20th (Herman Melville's incomparable whale hunt excepted). It is as dark as anything in Conrad, and the more vividly rendered for avoiding the portentous abstractions into which Conrad strayed at times.

The protagonist of "The Western Limit" – Masiel's second novel – is Harold Snow, a scarred 60-year-old Pearl Harbor survivor, now boatswain on a leaky "drugstore ship" carrying "bulk chemicals that ached to react with something: each other, sea water, air, or nothing but themselves." This disaster waiting to happen is the setting of the first half of the book, during which the ship has twice been given false papers, a new name and flag. What left Rotterdam as the Petrochem Mariner becomes the Tarshish out of Monrovia, Liberia, and then the Elisabeth out of Venezuela.

These changes of identity are in aid of a risky, ambitious and, if successful, lucrative piracy. Grudgingly abetted by Paynor the second mate, Snow and Charlie Bracelin, chief mate and effectively in command, intend to sell the cargoes at appropriate terminals, load new ones to sell farther along, and finally disappear the tanker – if it hasn't already fallen apart – split the money and disappear themselves. The captain, a sort of anti-Ahab, lies powerless below decks, ill and pacified with Valium.

This central plot emerges gradually, between storms and leaks, amid the tensions among the four main characters. Three of them are fully rendered with all their contradictions; the fourth, Bracelin, rules the tanker by an astute combination of threat, abuse, superior physical strength and, where necessary, a tact born of hard realism. Yet even Bracelin is kept from being any sort of standard villain, if only by his peculiarities, which include a habit of correcting the crew's grammar, and the precious navigation formulas tattooed on his big arms.

On the face of it a man's book, this is better described as an adult book, and its leading lady is, among other things, a no-nonsense feminist. Elisabeth Abudjah is turning 30, daughter of an English mother and a Liberian father. An able-bodied seaman – an uncommon but hardly unknown figure in the man's world of the merchant marine – she has earned her AB rank: Energetic, painstaking and efficient, she is ready to volunteer for hazardous tasks in emergencies.

She is also the sexual dream of the entire crew, a predicament she has learned to cope with thus: "I come aboard, and ... I pick the best and most strategic one and take him as a lover. Then the rest leave me alone. It's that simple, really. Men are quite territorial about sex, you know." Snow offers to pose as her lover, she accepts, and, though lusting after her asleep and awake, he begins the pretense, knowing it will give him some private time with her.

When young George Maciel joins the crew for his maiden voyage as an ordinary seaman, he carries the seabag of his grandfather, the man who had mentored and made a merchant seaman out of Snow after his shattering World War II naval experiences. Snow adopts Maciel, shows him the ropes – literally – and shares his cabin with him. Maciel turns out to be an escapee from a Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley; inevitably George and Beth meet, and soon stoke justifiable jealousy in Snow. The trust between the two men weakens.

From the interaction among these three (under the constant threat of Bracelin) grows the narrative center of the novel. Masiel's brilliant eye, skill and savvy make day-to-day tanker life as fascinating as it is harrowingly suspenseful; he also does full narrative justice to characterizing the foreign crewmen and American petty officers. As for the feeble captain, whether or not his illness and subsequent quiet death in the night are of natural causes remains moot. (So does the question of what to make of giving one main character a name one letter away from that of the author. During the 1980s, Masiel worked for nine years in the arctic oil fields, sailing on oceangoing tugboats and icebreakers. "The Western Limit of the World" is set in 1980.)

Virtually the entire novel plays out in and through Snow. Veteran of 40 years on tankers, he knows his business, including the ports along the way, as only an old pro can. No better than he ought to be, he still has an intermittently functional conscience. If Bracelin is the ship's boss, Snow is the man who runs the crew and keeps them in line as their fears and suspicions mount. In Malaysia, Latin America and West Africa, it is Snow who has the connections with corrupt officials on whom the schemers must rely; it is he, too, who goes ashore to deal with them in person.

At the same time he is haunted by his own bad past – the injuries done him and those perhaps worse ones he may have done others: "To him, life was a practical matter of survival and sex, and the two had always been tightly linked: he never felt sexless except when his life was in danger, and he never felt truly alive unless he was having sex." Existential may be too fancy a word for Snow, but an existentialist he has become, without the philosophical trimmings. To make him both sympathetic and a hero – of the real world rather than that of film formulas and video games – is one of the achievements of the novel.

A merchant ship is a tiny society of workers living together in a confined space: They may all believe in looking out for No. 1, but they have to cooperate or risk death. Serving distant bosses as well as the Bracelins of the world, their humanity makes them look for solidarity where they can find it – in little alliances, comradeship, friendship, even love. This is as true of "The Limits of the Western World" as of anything in Conrad, if not more so. In serious fiction, the romanticism and symbolism that the earlier writer generated have been out of favor for quite a long time, for good reason: For a contemporary reader, living in the world of 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, Masiel must seem the more realistic of the two. Conrad prided himself on being without illusions; Masiel needn't even mention them. His is a painfully contingent world, a world too hard to support illusions; no one is bulletproof, and no reader can be surprised at how many of the more decent characters in the cast die when the crunch comes.

Americans live in one of the richest and safest countries in the world, and still we are afraid. A vicarious tour of duty on the Mariner/Tarshish/Elisabeth offers us a psychological trip into the feelings of people trying to stay alive in all such places, near and far, which we never see on television. Hazardous as the sea is, the land proves at least as dangerous a trap when Snow, Beth and George – along with Bracelin – venture into a Liberia where Snow has lost a wife and a house, and where Beth was born; a Liberia in the chaos of revolution, where they must try to save what can be salvaged from their project, and live.

Masiel is never obvious, and any symbolism to be found in "The Western Limit of the World" is the best and most natural kind, never spelled out: there for the reader to see or not, as he or she is able. Among these driven solitaries, what and who survive, and how? It is worth reading this marvelous book to find out.

James Leigh is a musician, journalist, novelist and retired professor of English.