Voyage to the North Star

Voyage to the North Star

Carroll & Graf, 352 pp., $24

Voyage to the North Star shoots the curl of the gargantuan wave left by The Perfect Storm and others of its ilk aimed for the gullet of the ever-growing audience of disaster junkies. The idea here being that since readers like to read about real-life adventures, then perhaps they will want to read about similar but fictional adventures. With such influences as Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, author Peter Nichols has fashioned a Depression-era seafaring odyssey that is rich in description and peppered with social commentary. Nichols is an expert spellcaster who is so knowledgeable about boats and their lore that he must have been a boat in a past lifetime -- or at least a minor character in Moby Dick. The narrative's engine is fueled by the sadomasochistic rivalry between two disparate characters: Former captain Will Boden, a noble failure who -- like Conrad's Lord Jim -- refused to go down with his ship for humanitarian reasons, and the deliriously irresponsible Carl Schenck, a flamboyant millionbucksman who follows his own bliss uncognizant of the human wreckage he leaves in his wake. In an ironic twist, Boden's abandonment of his ship becomes the linchpin for Schenck's offer of a position to Boden as navigator for an arctic voyage on his latest acquisition, the Lodestar. Boden, citing the Lodestar's unfitfulness for arctic waters, at first refuses but ends up working beneath himself shoveling coal in the ship's furnace. Schenck, who models himself on the über-adventurer Teddy Roosevelt, lusts more than anything else for a pair of bowhead whale jawbones, and so he has a harpoon gun installed on the Lodestar just for that purpose. Percival, the Lodestar's resident captain, who so arrogantly incompetent that you expect him to start fondling metallic balls and order an investigation of missing strawberry ice cream, has other ideas for the harpoon. Voyage to the North Star may or may not spark a revival of the adventure tale, but it does provide entertaining company for the Robinson Crusoe stranded in all of us.