Living between the Deben and Orwell rivers it’s impossible not to be aware of Felixstowe’s container terminal
or not to be fascinated by it and the great ships that dock there. Horatio Clare’s book, now in paperback, feeds that fascination. Modelled on a container ship and its cargo, it’s written in appar- ently random, disconnected chunks, covering the ship, its people, its ports and passages and occa- sionally its cargoes, gradually allowing a picture of the strange life of the modern seafarer to emerge.
It covers voyages undertaken by the author on two ships. The first is the massive, modern, pur- pose-built Gerd Maersk, teetering and tottering like a yacht in a heavy sea. The second: an ancient rustbucket serving out her time on a Great Circle route across the North Atlantic from Rotterdam to Montreal, through ice and blizzard, following the wartime Atlantic Convoys, which Clare recalls at some length. Frightening and dangerous, even now, and poorly-paid but summoning the Conradian spirit of the seafarer. Someone once told me it cost one dollar to ship a fridge from China to the UK. And a lot more in human stoicism and sacrifice. Peter Willis
Published by Vintage Books paperback 352pp, £8.99