Beyond the Sea

January 1, 2020
Adrift in a disabled boat in the Pacific, two fishermen try to survive. Despite the weather forecast, Bolivar, a brash fisherman and drinker who's desperate for money, insists on heading out to fish. The only problem? His partner is missing. So his boss introduces him to Hector, a sensitive teenager without any serious experience at sea. Even before the storm damages their engine and blows them hundreds of miles into the Pacific, the two men are at odds, but, adrift at sea--with no radio, a minimum of fishing gear, and diminishing chances of rescue--they're forced to reckon more deeply with each other and themselves and various miragelike visions of the lives behind them on land. Can they learn to respect each other? Can they vanquish their dehydration, starvation, the maddening vastness of the sea? Can they keep each other alive? Irish novelist Lynch (Grace, 2017, etc.) is at his most memorable when relating the details of sea life and survival: The sea is a veritable marketplace of plastic bags, barrels, cups, and other useful things; an albatross' "insides are full of undigested plastic"; a captured turtle "gestures some unfathomable thought with its flippers"; and the men subsist on fish, seabirds, and barnacles scraped from the hull of the boat and seasoned with brine. But Lynch's characters are less impressive than these details, perhaps because they seem too-perfectly-constructed foils for one another: Hector's religiosity, for example, feels less like an authentically worn belief than a useful contrast to Bolivar's materialism and secular hope. And though Lynch at times beautifully encapsulates the harshness of life on the ocean--"each bead of water that passes the lips...is a drop of time and life distilled"--his sentences are too often stilted, overstylized, and full of half-profound sentimentality: "[Bolivar] studies the outness of the world. The profound colours of night. His ear attending to the silence. A growing feeling of awareness coming upon him. What you are among this. He imagines an ocean full of container ships and tankers, each ship moving constant and true and yet all passing within this same silence, the silence itself passing within this outness that is itself always silent." A story of remarkable endurance at sea conveyed unremarkably.

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April 6, 2020
This haunting tale from Lynch (Grace) depicts the evolution of a friendship forged while adrift on an unforgiving ocean. With a storm approaching and desperate to bring in a day’s catch, Bolivar, an experienced fisherman in an unnamed country, takes Hector, a novice fisherman and the son of Bolivar’s boss, out to sea. The two ignore a storm warning and depart the safety of the lagoon for Bolivar’s usual distant fishing spot. Soon, what begins as a huge haul becomes a terrifying ordeal as the storm nearly sinks the ship. Without a radio, GPS, or a motor, the men end up adrift in the ocean for over a year. The initial quick pacing gives way to languid, sparse chapters in which the men explore their relationships, values, and spirituality: “He studies the chalk face of the moon and speaks to it as an old friend.” The many harsh “days of hammering sun” are marked by the rationing of water and strips of fish, and studded by moments of “soaring happiness” that capture a peaceful “stillness growing between Bolivar and Hector that is also an understanding.” Lynch’s enchanting tale reveals the stark beauties that come from struggling to live at the mercy of the natural world.

February 1, 2020
This grim, lyrical novel by Irish author Lynch (Grace, 2017) follows a South American fisherman who heads out into the Pacific in the face of a coming storm, hoping to both make a good catch and avoid those who've promised to cut off his ears if he doesn't repay a debt. Because his usual fishing partner isn't available, Bolivar takes a chance on teenage Hector, who has no experience on the open sea. Soon enough, the two are in more trouble than they could have imagined. Surviving the storm, they find the motor on the boat has conked out, and without any means of communication, they're swept farther out to sea every day. As they face one problem after another, and as Hector, who refuses to eat raw fish, weakens, the bond between them grows. While some may find the constant talk about will and the existential philosophizing tiresome, the day-to-day struggles of Bolivar and his companion are vividly realized, and the conflict between a human being and his harsh environment is distilled to its essence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)