Book Review 2016-005
Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye
2010 by Unbridled Books, 244 pages
(While I am sure I received a galley of this from the publisher when it came out, I bought the copy I read from Literati in Ann Arbor)
Somebody out there smarter and better read than I am has probably put together a list of wonderful writers that were brought to the reading public for the first time by the duo of Greg Michalson and Fred Ramey in their various publishing incarnations (William Gay, Steve Yarbrough, Rick Collignon, Masha Hamilton, Andrea Portes, Virginia Pye, Frederick Reuss for starters), and while it took me six years to get to it, I'm very glad that Peter Geye was added to that list. Safe From the Sea is a great read on many levels. There's a great father-son story; there's at least one great husband-wife story within; there's a not quite coming-of-age aspect to it; and smack in the middle there's a page-turning aspect that would make most suspense writers happy. It also is a wonderful representation of Midwest writing.
What Geye has really done though in my mind, is taken a somewhat familiar premise--dad and son not speaking so much for many years, dad let's son know he needs help/is dying, they pretty much work through things before dad dies--yet created a novel in which his readers will find themselves flipping the pages rapidly, caring about the characters--not just those two but the others that sit more on the peripheries--and not find that everything fits together in the end like it was just a well-conceived jigsaw puzzle.
The novel begins with a prologue that I believe actually works. Too often a prologue simply to me seems to be chapter one with no reason to be singled out. However in this work, the prologue occurs many years before the current time. It has one of the main characters, Olaf Torr (the father) working on a ship in the Great Lakes, talking to a co-worker about the fact that his wife has just recently (nine days) had given birth to his son, Noah (the son). In a scant few pages the reader learns quite a bit about Olaf, about his work as an officer on the ship headed for the Soo, on his thoughts ("sad and beautiful") about his missing his wife and child.
The novel proper begins with Olaf calling Noah, who he really hasn't spoken to since attending Noah's wedding to Natalie some six years earlier. He asks Noah for help, which might stun him even more than the fact that the old man has called in the first place. A quick side story develops as Natalie is pretty horrified that Noah is even considering leaving as they've been trying to have a child regularly and she's ovulating. Noah's taking off creates at least two potential issues of tension--he and his father, and the obvious tension with Natalie.
What transpires between Noah and Olaf is extremely well done. There's no big blow up scene between the two of them, there's no big make-up scene. Their conversations begin slightly stilted and develop throughout the novel. Noah realizes just how bad off Olaf is as the two of them fish and work a bit around Olaf's very out of the way home in Misquah, a good hour outside of Duluth, Minnesota. Noah, who owns and works in a vintage map store, takes at the very least a small liking to the physical work necessary around the place--the chopping of wood, the crisp weather, even going to far as to do something he never was considered man enough to do before he left, something he'd only seen his father and grandfather do, bathe in the lake--the water cold enough to shock your body into not breathing upon entry. It's this subtle transformation of Noah that I consider to be a not-quite coming-of-age story.
Throughout the novel, Olaf and Noah treat each other more like men than they do father and son. The father-son dynamic is present, but with Noah needing to do so much to help Olaf, there's just enough of it pulled back to allow Noah to act closer to an equal to his father than as a son. Make no mistake, there is still that presence of a son wanting to please his father, wanting to make him proud, but it's not over the top.
There's something about this man to man aspect their relationship takes that allows some things that occur to make more sense than they otherwise might. A monster component to this story is the fact that the ship Olaf was an officer on in the prologue, the Ragnarøk, sank in Lake Superior. Olaf was one of three survivors. From the moment they were rescued he lived life differently--he drank too much, quit properly communicating with his family, became much more withdrawn. This led to his wife cheating on him with their neighbor, to the kids, Noah and his sister, Solveig, growing up confused to say the least, and shut out from him. While Noah is in Misquah, he asks Olaf about that night--quick aside, the day he arrived in Duluth, he visited a Great Lakes Shipping Museum and had reviewed a section on the wreck of the ship, including a photo of the crew including his father--and where I'm not so sure Olaf would have shared the story were Noah acting the petulant child, his going along with the conversation seemed to fit.
This would be the page-turner aspect of the novel--it's hard to believe that Peter Geye didn't spend some time on freighters in the Great Lakes as a young man. He's either very well read on the topic or listened to a lot of old yarns in bars over the years, but his description of the storm hitting Superior while the Ragnarøk was cutting across, and how the men worked to get through, and the details of the various rooms, and the ice on the deck, and the lifeboats, and beyond is riveting. It's a lengthy section of the novel and it is subtly interspersed with Noah either having recollections, or having realizations about his father--about this event and how it affected the old man. While they've seemingly been doing okay together, hearing this story direct from Olaf is what pushes their relationship to being truly back to solid father-son ground. Especially when it hits a point, after telling of their rescue, when Olaf admits:
“For most of your life I’ve used that night as an excuse. Not because I wanted or needed one but because I had no control over what it did to me. I should have. Hard as it would’ve been, I should have beaten it.”
It's a pretty astonishing admission and it comes across in a simple fashion. And this is what brings me to the Midwestern aspect of Geye's novel. And it's not surprising, Peter Geye was born and raised in Minnesota and resides there now. This novel is not flashy in any way. The language is straightforward, and there's a strong element of work ethic within. It's a trait Midwesterners are rightly proud of--you get up, put in a hard day's work, and go to bed exhausted. There is also that feeling of needing to beat back the elements that try to slow you down--the weather, downturns in the economy, jobs being sent elsewhere, and even things like a huge storm over Lake Superior causing you to be one of three men to survive a shipwreck and fire.
Geye has again taken a pretty standard fiction trope and created within that trope a story that is anything but standard. It is powerful in the emotions it brings forth, especially with the lack of flash invoked. Even the story of the shipwreck works through in a straightforward manner. The shipwreck aspect might keep this from what I would call a quiet novel, but just barely. This is a novel full of events, but they don't feel eventful; they feel more like every day life than again, the idea of a well-conceived jigsaw puzzle. Once again, Greg Michalson and Fred Ramey, this time via Unbridled Books, have given readers their first taste of a wonderful writer in Peter Geye. I look forward to reading much more of his work over the years.
4.5 stars
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