‘Not Being on a Boat’ by Esmé Claire Keith

Reviewed by Hubert O’Hearn

Esmé Claire Keith’s dark comic novel feels like the answer to a writer’s challenge. What is the absolute least amount of information you can give about a main character while still managing to have an audience give a damn about his or her fate? The challenge is met here, although whether it has been met successfully is a matter of mixed opinion. Not Being on a Boat is written in the first person, in the voice of a Mr. Rutledge who has chosen to begin his retirement cruising around the world on the luxury liner Mariola.

Trust me, I’m not giving away a thing when I tell you everything else we learn about Mr. Rutledge’s biography from page one through three hundred forty seven. He is well-off. He has financial consultants who handle his money. His ex-wife Laureen divorced him. They had a daughter. And that’s about the size of it.

Here are a few odds and ends we don’t learn about Mr. Rutledge:

His first name.
His hometown.
His previous occupation.
His age.

One can make a pretty good stab at figuring out why Laureen gave him his walking papers. Rutledge is one of the prissiest kill-joys I have ever run across— and I would enjoy running across him, preferably under truck tires. Even before the disasters that destroy the cruise appear, Rutledge deals with the experience with the narrowest emotional range imaginable. His greatest exclamation of wild exuberance is ‘nice’. Shuddering self-contemplation and catharsis is confined to: “I sat between Denise, who didn’t bring a book this time, and a younger girl, Jen, not really good-looking, but noisy and entertaining for a few hours. She was blonde and energetic, and I thought she was about my daughter’s age, and that made me sad for a minute but I shrugged it off.”

Now it is true that there are reticent people all around us and it is not at all necessary for all characters in fiction to express themselves in rants delivered between mouthfuls of scenery— that sort of thing can get quite tiring after a few chapters. There is a nasty trap though for the writer in choosing such a person as the narrative voice. In a nutshell, they’re boring.

The Mariola either starts or is caught up in a Caribbean uprising (one is never quite sure what exactly happened), yet even before shore visits are canceled, the blandly prissy Rutledge cuts all the sycophantic fun the reader might have. An example:

We rolled out of the pier, through the checkpoint, and into the city. It was small and ramshackle. We crawled up narrow, crowded streets till we broke through to a wide avenue with fountains and statues. At the top of it, there was a big building, the seat of government, in sort of a Spanish style. The guide made us get off the bus to see it. He wouldn’t let us bring our drinks.

The easy thing to do is to blame the author for these mealy-mouthed terms: small, big, sort of. For God’s sake, what made that style look Spanish in the first place? Were there Moorish arches? Terracotta walls? A flamenco dancer spinning in a window? Tell me something!

Yet I don’t blame Keith directly for this cramped and pinched, completely prissy writing. When the novel does take off – for instance in the set-piece of the Gala Dinner and Dance – there is a shrewd wit that shines like a single star cutting through an overcast night sky. The flirtations of junior officers aimed at smouldering female passengers are cunningly written and ring both true and funny. That scene works for two reasons – Rutledge is getting thoroughly pissed on gallons of wine, allowing his tongue to loosen; plus the other characters are given extended opportunities to display their personalities. That scene works, as does a shorter action scene on the flight deck when the Entrepreneur (no he doesn’t get a full name either) escapes the doomed ship. Keith can write; she just has chosen to speak through a character who can barely talk.

There is one other problem with Not Being on a Boat. When writing a comedy for any medium, an unbreakable rule is that characters must behave in a manner that fits what ‘real’ people would do in the same circumstances. You can be as absurd or fantastic as you’d like around that, but there must be a logical through-line to the behaviour. To break that rule means the reader will dismiss the whole enterprise.

To demonstrate the point, I’m going to have to give away the main plot of the book. That is something I hate to do, but the situation calls for it. The Mariola, as mentioned earlier, is either cause or victim of an international incident in the Caribbean. Because of this I think the Company that owns the cruise line runs out of money leaving their ship unsupplied in the Pacific after it makes its run through the Panama Canal.

Now, let me turn the helm over to the reader. If you were in charge of a ship that has dwindling supplies placing lives in danger, what would you do? Should you find this a tricky question to answer, let me say this: Your next fishing trip? I’m not going with you. For the solution is obvious. Once fuel and food reach a critical point, you are going to make for the nearest harbour and damn the consequences. The lowliest lock-up will at least offer a cot and three hots. Yet the Mariola doesn’t do that.

It is possible to write one’s way out of the trap. If there has been some World War Three nuclear apocalypse, turning all ports into uninhabitable glowing ghost towns, then maybe the chances on the high seas waiting for salvation might be the way to go. Personally, I’d still take to the life boats and I think you would too. The Mariola’s crew and remaining passengers don’t. And a breakdown of satellite or phone communications don’t give the reader that thread of logic to explain the behaviour.

What one is left with is a novel that has some bright and enjoyable scenes written by a talented author who wrote herself into a trap. It’s a shame really. Off the top of my head I can’t think of another novel I’ve read in recent years that would have more benefited from a third person narrator and a bit more detail. Rutledge then would have been another (and welcome) character in a rut, while preventing the reader from leaping off a ledge.