Second Time Around Book

Hammond Innes published The Strode Venturer about the time I was reading Nordhoff and Hall's Bounty Trilogy. For some time thereafter, I would reread Nordhoff and Hall's novels on the Bounty every year (when I read them again a couple of years ago, I realized how much went past me as a youngster and how intricate and impressive the trilogy really was). I mention Nordhoff and Hall because The Strode Venturer is in the same tradition. Where Nordhoff and Hall, writing in the years after World War I, picked up on Melville's and Stevenson's adventures in isolated and unexplored oceans, Innes set his tale in the early 1960s and told of a seaman fighting against corrupt authority and tradition, while battling the most basic elements of nature, all in order not only just to survive but to triumph.

That is what happens in this story set mainly in the Indian Ocean, centered around the discovery and claim of a newly born volcanic island. The island is not only a redemption for Geoffrey Bailey, a retired naval commander whose life is in tatters, but for the people of Addu Atoll, who see in the island a means of regaining independence and the preservation of their traditional way of life.

Like Melville and Nordhoff and Hall, Innes' novels have a classic quality to them. Their stories only seem stronger and more appealing with the passage of time. Why? Because while Innes admits the presence of the modern world into his novels, the essence of them is about isolating men (and sometimes women) from the security of modernity and testing them against the raw forces of nature. Sometimes, it is the desert. More often, it is the sea. He belongs to a tradition of fiction stretching back to writers obsessed with the South Seas. Even further, you can see the influence of Defoe and Robinson Crusoe and, in another context, Moll Flanders. For unlike characters in other of Innes' novels I have read, the author seems to inhabit Bailey. Bailey, indeed, stands mostly by himself, here. Other characters only sweep into his narrative to escape once more like a visiting comet. Even, Ida, the sister of Peter Strode, who launches Bailey on his quest, appears only at the margins. And this while she is falling in love with Bailey.