I first came across Redmond O’Hanlon in an early edition of Granta magazine, which included an excerpt from Into the Heart of Borneo, the book detailing his travels with James Fenton. I was quite a fan of James Fenton as well at the time, who was also being excerpted in Granta and was The Independent’s far eastern correspondent.
Anyway, O’Hanlon went on to write a couple more travel books including In Trouble Again, and Congo Journey (which I must confess that I haven’t read).
Trawler,
is O’Hanlon’s most recent book, and is set in a less exotic part of the world – the North Atlantic. He sets out on a trawler in a force 12 hurricane in January to try to experience life as a trawlerman.
This isn’t a bog standard travel book, because once they leave land, that’s the last you see of it. Their vessel is obviously quite small, and the conditions reasonably primitive. The men also have a clear idea of the mortality of their jobs, but they seem to love it.
The book consists largely of conversations – in particular, between O’Hanlon and Luke, the man from the ministry who’s sorted out his berth. Sometimes these conversations go on for pages or even chapters at a time, and I do have to ask how anyone can them with such clarity, particularly towards the start of the trip when violent sea-sickness is the order of the day.
But it’s an extraordinary other world that we don’t think about, even as we eat our cod and chips, the cod probably having been flown in from Iceland.
On a supplemental note, there’s a major report being published this week examining the future of the British fishing industry which really will be worth reading.
And Radio 4 have just completed a two part documentary entitled Future Fish (not currently available in the science archive) investigating possible solutions.