The master mariner’s tale: Why experience trumps preparation
Dick Durham reviews Tom Cunliffe’s new thriller, proving that a lifetime at sea creates a story more authentic than any polished script
Some years ago, I arrived at a chilly sports centre in the Midlands to give a talk to some yachtsfolk keen enough to turn up on a winter’s night. One old shellback had got there early and watched me roll out my power cable and start linking wires to computer, projector and microphone. ‘We ’ad that Tom Cunliffe up here last time,’ he said. ‘Oh?’ I replied. ‘Yes, and ’ee ’ad none of that kit you’ve got. ’Ee just stood up and said: “What would you like me to talk about?”’ ‘Bet you weren’t disappointed, though?’ I laughed. ‘We wasn’t,’ he said, and shuffled off for a pint.
It occurred to me then that experience, I mean profound experience, deep experience is all you need to be authoritative, authentic and appealing. Preparation is for those without it. Recently, I recalled that night while reading Tom’s first novel, Hurricane Force – a thriller that will have you on the edge of your locker because you can feel it.
Fact is stranger than fiction, they say, but when fiction is no stranger to the truth the result is a powerful read. There’s a seriously malevolent character in the yarn whose handling of a gun makes for a page-turning journey.
Not surprising really as Tom once stared down the muzzle of a barrel himself in his ocean wanderings. He was also once given a Smith & Wesson revolver plus ammo by a concerned pal in Brazil. However, after using the bullets to shoot tin cans out on the ocean, the gun went rusty and he threw it overboard!
As for the seascapes Tom pens, they are graphic and again very real. He once rode out a hurricane hove-to in the Gulf Stream and so such description is alive, as at the eye of the storm: ‘Not a cock crowed to greet the dawn. Those that hadn’t been blown away knew there was more to come…
The air was as still as the second day of creation, before God got around to organising any wind…’ And then as the second wall of the hurricane approaches: ‘… at that moment the mist which the growing heat of the day was creating suddenly began to boil upwards… as a writhing wall of cloud strode across from the ocean… the mighty heat engine was back in business.’
Aboard Dream of Olwen, his 42ft converted Cornish fishing lugger, skipper Ian Hordle is given to Runyonesque humour; because Tom writes how he talks, one can hear the author as his character’s ventriloquist.
Filling the saucepan with seawater, he uses ‘the North Atlantic’s finest’ for cooking; when he meets a hard-bitten character ashore in an out of the way Caribbean island he notes ‘he’d obviously lost an argument with a windscreen;’ comparing his old lugger with a modern property developer’s yacht: ‘it was palatial although compared with my homely hutch it had the atmosphere of a high-class airport departure lounge.’
The same applies to the love interest in the novel. For example, when Ian meets Joanna, the posh yacht’s cook: ‘She didn’t seem old enough to be so well qualified, but I wasn’t growing any younger myself. The world of the mid-twenties was beginning to blend into one huge youth club from which I was tacitly excluded….We all shook hands solemnly. Joanna’s was cool and pleasantly dry… my own was on the clammy side of neutral.’
Best of all is Tom’s clear-enough-for-the-layman prose style when it comes to technicalities. Once again, his experience shines through, as any yachtsman finding himself confronted with a tropical storm could do a lot worse than follow the method employed by Ian Hordle, including stripping his halyards to cut down on windage.
How many times have you read the blurb on a history book: ‘It reads like a novel.’ Tom’s novel could bear the slogan: ‘It reads like a survival guide,’ both for dealing with highjackers and hurricanes.
Buy a copy of Hurricane Force, by Tom Cunliffe from Amazon
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