Trawler

Rating:
Summary: Natural history and fishing culture at a manic pace
Review: After reading "In Trouble Again" and "Into the Heart of Borneo" I had pegged O'Hallahan as a prime example of the British "Fish out of water, funny things happen" school of travel writing. Sort of Bill Bryson in really exotic places. And I really liked these books.
"Trawler" is something else, though. The setting this time is not some tropical jungle, but a fishing vessel in the middle of a winter storm in the Northern Atlantic. Nature becomes a terrorizing presence that robs the people on the boat of peace of mind and sleep, and leads to frenzied, almost delusional conversations about everything from life on small islands to marine biology. The pace is close to Hunter Thompson's drug-addled ramblings, but here it is driven by the need to make sense of at least something in the face of the on-slaught of the elements.
The ideas expressed in the book would be interesting even if expressed in a more conventional setting, but the rythm that is pushed onto the people on the boat by the storm makes it irresitable. As much as I liked "The Lobster Chronicles", I don't think it holds a candle to this book.

Rating:
Summary: Something else again from wonderfully weirdo O'Hanlon
Review: I don't even know where to start. It will be utterly fascinating to see where the almighty critics and pundits line up on this one. As used as we are to O'Hanlon's oddities, this book will try most of us ... and with good result and more.

This isn't a "No Mercy" book from O'Hanlan's pen; it's something else entirely, totally different. In fact, maybe, there's too much mercy -- depends upond how one feels about male bonding. Neverless, I've rarely read a more rivetting tome, really -- I'm talking finest kind here. It's just ... well, I don't know what to think of it yet.

It's not like anything I ever read before ... and, fron O'Hanlon, that has to be a good thing -- but difficult to describe. Quite amazing. Some folk won't like this book and that will be their own penance and sorrow since its so very finest kind ... although entirely wierd.

There's a certain lack of discipline that is, er, disgustingly charming. I think.

Rating:
Summary: Bad case of sleep-deprived testosterone poisoning
Review: I usually like O'Hanlon's books...I usually can't put them down. But this one...well, I'm just not sure I like it at all. Written in what O'Hanlon, I'm sure, thinks is a style akin to the sleep-deprived ramblings he must have encountered on the trawler, the book instead veers into incoherence and becomes only annoying. Revelations only work if you feel some sympathy and identification with the speaker and I found the speakers, with one exception, highly uninteresting and unsympathetic. Only big Bryan held my interest and I wanted to hear more from him.
I found myself heartily sick of Luke, the walk-on-water marine biologist...he was like an orchestra work comprised of one note, played over and over and over. Jason the skipper...same thing. O'Hanlon invests them with a false nobility that just grates on the nerves after awhile.
I can't recommend this book, but I heartily recommend O'Hanlon's other works.


Rating:
Summary: I jumped ship
Review: I went fifty pages. I'm very interested in maritime lore and sea stories, but this was rough going. The narrator's friend Luke is made to spew lots of didactic talk about things the author is too lazy to show us. His emotions are conveyed through the constant use of italics, and he begins every sentence with the author's first name.

Potentially very interesting, and apparently enjoyable to some, I thought this was a mess.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent (don't be put off by the manic monologues)!
Review: Redmond O'Hanlon chose to limit himself strictly on the descriptions of what had actually happened aboard a commercial trawler out in the North Atlantic. This must have been a challenging task; after all, a plethora of issues surrounds Scottish fishing industry that would make writers' finger twitch (economics and politics of fishery management, environmental impacts of otter board trawling, deep sea biology and so on). With this self-enforced limitation, O'Hanlon decided to focus on a handful of issues that made his trip very special; the relentless weather and incessant physical labors on the ship, severe sleep deprivation utterly unimaginable to most of us and encyclopedic knowledge displayed by a young biology student, Luke Bullough.

The horrific weather is evident throughout the book; every move is difficult in this rough sea, and O'Hanlon could feel it in his gut. There is very little sense of time passing, which testifies to the hectic but monotonous nature of the trade. But most importantly, it is the sense of sleep deprivation (miserable brain malfunction) that O'Hanlon succeeds most in conveying; the bombardment of non-stop, uncontrollable, loosely structured sentences. A big chaos. A real stream-of-consciousness. But he manages to stop short of becoming gibberish. Though it is sometimes difficult to go through, the information is all there. Greenland halibut. Orange roughy (critically overfished in the North Atlantic). Relationship between a skipper and an engineer. A fear of becoming uxorious (overly fond of one's wife). O'Hanlon himself offers a few anecdotes here and there and reveals his obsession with the idea of sexual selection and alpha mates.

The book is entertaining and informative. O'Hanlon has an aloof sense of humor but on a few occasions, is also poignant. Yes, there are numerous chaotic passages, but they are there to help the reader's experience, as a junior crew of a deep sea trawler, with no sleep and no rest for the past 48 hours. About two-thirds into the book, at the height of this all-neurons-gone-haywire, O'Hanlon's conversation with one of the most rugged shipmates of all, Robbie, reaches a revelation; the whole purpose of the book, why he approached it in the way he did. A good effort.

Rating:
Summary: A Murky Mess
Review: REDMOND O'HANLON'S latest book, Trawler, reads just like the behemoth fishing vessel upon which it purports to report. It's a lumbering, slow-moving tome that searches relentlessly for a nourishing tidbit to dredge-up from some murky depth..
O'Hanlon's heavy work might have been an insightful article had it been restricted to 2000 words and published in an industry rag such as TRAWLER TIMES, but at 339 pages it quickly becomes bogged in the doldrums.
There are a few choice passages to be sure, but mostly it reads like a journal kept by a precocious and often sulky 14-year-old sea scout. And being English, O'Hanlon is given to whimsical asides the likes of which often give the impression that this scout was more than a bit petulant.
Long passages of this book seem like wordy conversations simply transcribed, without edit, from some hidden recording device. There literally appears page after page of stream of consciousness-like observations, served up without paragraph breaks or meaningful insights.
The overwhelming detail borders on the redundant, the character sketches seem incomplete, and the author's dense commentary so buried amongst the many pages that at times one would like to just tie a rope to this book and use it as an anchor.

By the end of the volume, I felt as though it were I who had stood days on end in the fish cleaning room, repeatedly performing the same mindless task, but rather than gutting haddock, in this instance, it was the bloody drudgery of page turning.

Rating:
Summary: Glad He Went There Instead of Me.
Review: Since reading the stories of the U-Boats and convoys in the North Atlantic in the middle of winter I've always wanted to see what it was like.

This book cured me of any possible thoughts I might have had about actually doing something about it.

Apparently the author had some of the same ideas. Unlike me he actually did something about it. I'm glad he did, now I don't have to. I learned from him that I especially do not want to go see the North Atlantic on a fishing trawler.

The book is kind of strange in its way of writing. But I think he was trying to capture the actual nature of the conversations being conducted by sleep deprived men. He couldn't write this way, he couldn't think this way normally and be the successful author he is. I think that writing like this shows a lot more talent than the normal travelogue.

This is a book that will make you think strange thoughts as you look at a piece of fish on your plate. If you want a book on going strange places, this is clearly the one.

Rating:
Summary: boring incoherent mumbling
Review: The author travels on a British fishing trawler through the Atlantic. He glances over all the technical details of the fishing, and concentrates on the conversations of the crew. This turns the book into an incoherent rambling, jumping from topic to topic. It's never quite clear what is fact and what is lore. The book is similar to listening to random conversations at a cocktail party where you don't know anybody, except it is mainly about mating rituals of different fish mixed with British accent swearwords.

I would much more recommend "The Hungry Ocean" and "Lobster Chronicles " by Linda Greenlaw, or "Working on the Edge" and "Coming Back Alive" by Spike Walker.