David's Reviews > In Hazard

Among countless other things—both real and imaginary—I'm afraid of water. Not drinking water, of course, but the roiling seas whose power and caprice spell certain doom for the likes of me. Because (of course) I can't swim. Complementing this missing skill set, I lack any effectiveness in crisis situations, so my chances of successfully floating until the sharks ate me are (in the most generous of terms) laughable. My inability to swim was primarily informed by a perplexity at why anyone would even want to, recreationally speaking. Near-nudity in what amounts to a communal bath tub doesn't exactly appeal to my demographic. The demographic of one.

Richard Hughes' seafaring adventure In Hazard clearly benefits from my fear of water. Certain parts of it—where the protagonist ship the Archimedes is tossed hither and thither in the eyeteeth of a monstrous hurricane—are suspenseful and utterly gripping. Hughes has a talent for transmitting a breathless sense of real peril to his readers. On more than a few occasions, I actually lost myself in the adventure of it—which is remarkable for me because when I am reading a book I am also usually thinking about myself reading a book. There is very little direct access to experience for me; it's generally mediated by a self-awareness which deflects some of the impact.

But... (With a three-star rating, you knew there'd be a 'but' ambling along shortly.) Other parts of In Hazard are just really boring and uneven. Let me explain. This may surprise many of you who know me, but I am not a steam ship captain of the 1930s. I'm often mistaken for one on the street, in my jaunty sailor's cap, my striped shirt, and my careless stubble, but it's true: I can not actually pilot a seaworthy vessel. Shocking, I know. Richard Hughes, however—owing to some sort of epic misunderstanding of Three's Company proportions—seems to believe I'm well-versed in the nomenclature and mechanics of steam ship travel. In the first half of the book in particular, he speaks casually about all kinds of gadgets and whatchamacallits that keep a ship running and presupposes of his readers a working knowledge of their general operation. Yeah, good luck with that one, Dick Hughes.

So in essence, this is how passages of the book read to your average layman:

Seeing that the overhead bearing platform had come loose from the whinny rig, Henry clamped the number eight finglestick to the precariously unmoored cumble rack, which was dripping oil from the reclamation spout on its leeward side. In a panic, Captain Bieber mounted the aft reversible humperdinck valve to the mainstay colander support and shouted, 'You better turn the kardashian valve forty-five degrees toward the summer salad duodenum or we'll lose all of our stippled cobblerspeck, goddamnit!'

But that's not the only problem. In the second half of the book Hughes devotes a wildly disproportionate number of pages to the backstory of one of the Chinese crew members who has never been mentioned before. It's odd and extremely conspicuous because it really goes nowhere and seems to have been inserted into the novel for no apparent reason. I'm not saying it isn't (sort of) interesting, but why is it here? And where was the editor—the voice of reason to say, 'Hey, Dick, love what you've done with this, but it's like you've eaten three or four different meals here and puked them up into the same toilet bowl.' I mean, he could be more diplomatic about it, but constructive criticism was warranted.