Philip Caputo: The Voyage

By JOHN McCRYSTAL*

Imagine this: you're 15, you've just got your restricted driver's licence and your dad takes you down to a motorway on-ramp, gives you the keys to the Maserati and a fistful of cash and tells you not to come back for a month. What would you think? What would you do?

That, by analogy, is the premise at the heart of the fifth novel by Philip Caputo, The Voyage. Nathaniel, 18, Eliot, 15, and Drew, 13, are put aboard the family schooner by Cyrus Braithwaite, their father, a north-east American, late-Victorian millionaire hard man, and told to get lost for a few months.

What follows is a kind of watery road movie as the impetuosity of Nathaniel leads them in a quixotic quest to the Florida Straits, where disaster overtakes them. Tribulation and their bewilderment and sense of betrayal at their father's mysterious act sever each of the three from their childhood.

Caputo introduces another time frame and two more characters - 1998, and two descendants of Cyrus, who are puzzling over the meaning of the voyage and seeking the skeleton that must lie in the family closet to account for it.

There's a deeper level, too, with the voyage taking place against the background of some of the greatest upheavals in American history: the Civil War and the Spanish War have been and gone, slavery has been abolished, science is gaining ground at the expense of religion and America itself is adrift.

Deeper still, the narrative is full of the contrasts between superstition and rationalism and the purchase that each has upon the world: the little chants and rituals that sailors practise to keep themselves safe, the superstitious dread before the moods of the sea, the coolly precise arts of navigation by contrast with the vagaries of the weather.

You get the impression that Caputo, who spent nearly a year in the 1970s as a hostage of Islamic religious fanatics, has little stomach for organised religion.

Despite a certain amount of dunnage aboard in the form of the redundant second narrative, and numerous overwritten passages where it carries far too much canvas, this novel mostly cracks along. You'll finish it with a weatherbeaten feeling, and like the young protagonists, you'll emerge from The Voyage sadder and wiser.

HarperCollins

$29.95

* John McCrystal is an Auckland freelance writer.