Ship to Shore

It’s 1979 and a chemical tanker is anchored outside the San Francisco bay. The crew, a worn bunch of miscreants, is antsy for shore leave, but the Coast Guard adjunct onboard the Tarshish isn’t about to let the vessel in harbor. The ship is a battered wreck, a WWII holdover. She’s got tanks brimming with petrol and acids, and she’s more likely to kill marine life by her un-ballasted presence than by the skilled angling acumen of any salts onboard.

Snow, the ship’s boatswain, is a Richmond native, and he’s signed up a new ordinary without meeting him. Maciel, a religious nut (and a USF grad!!!) with a penchant for self inflicted wraps with the cat-o-nine tails, boards from a water taxi and Snow gets the correct drift that young turk has never set foot on a working barge. Snow is beholden to Maciel’s long dead grandfather, so he takes the kid under and shows him deckhand basics. The ship can’t offload in SF, so they settle for the nearest vice region willing to pay for toxics, Panama.

David Masiel’s The Western Limit of the World is a thin story thrown into overdrive with amped, heinous characters. The book takes the Tarshish and crew from SF to Namibia, and along the way hell breaks loose on and off shore. It’s a rough world of rough men at sea, and the addition of Rotterdam hottie Lisabeth to the action only sets tempers higher. If the Tarshish is the ship one must take across the Styx, it is definitely Hades bound.

Masiel does a fair job with story and dialogue. He is derivative of McCarthy (think of the subtitle of Blood Meridian and you get his title’s cadence) and lesser Conrad, yet the thinness of this quick 300 pager makes for quality entertainment. The heights of antagonism and treachery are exemplified in the mate, Bracelin, a Queequeg with spite on his mind. Bracelin’s battles with Snow and Maciel and just about everyone else he encounters make for the best reading, as does the nighttime undoing of the crew’s unity onshore in Monrovia.

Masiel may or may not know about hard life asea. He does well with scenes showing the conflict of men pressed together, but he often cheats the reader of viable resolutions. I liked it better than London’s The Sea Wolf, which is still a good, lightweight seafaring adventure.

I’m ready to get back on land. I’m ready for The Tunnel; screw lightweight entertainment!