The Silent World (National Geographic Adventure Classics) Book

The opening shot of Louis Malle's film version of "The Silent World" tracks a platoon of divers as they descend through blue water; the focus of the shot, however, is not the men themselves, but on the long strings of bubbles emitted by their regulators, and the flares each of them is holding. The trace in other words: a flexible, buoyant, and irrepressible string, which threads the seawater beautifully and then disappears on the surface, in a series of harmless gurgles.

Cousteau's writing in The Silent World mimics those bubbles. Like Saint Expurey, or Jean-Luc Godard - like so many French artists of the 20th century - he is a skywriter, whose work pulses with tangible enjoyment and the thrill of discovery, challenge, victory. In this way, Cousteau's life can be read, like this book, as an enormous essay; that is, as an attempt whose constant, proboscis-like forward motion is balanced by a childlike self-awareness, a wonder at one's own accomplishment, which keeps the whole thing fresh and superiorly - I almost want to say innocently - poised. The dives are balletic, and so is the prose that recounts those dives, for like Stendhal, Cousteau exhibits an almost Spielbergian adaptation to his medium. Words fit him like the shell fits the hermit crab, like the water, implausibly enough, fit the "menfish." All of whom all seem to be happily and undoubtably at home.

Complications? Witness the original manfish, Frederick Dumas, Cousteau's co-author and a sort of Queequeg here, wild and irrepressible. It seems that every time "Didi" shows up, a fish gets harpooned. The carnage is general: a string running through this book as consistently and unmissably as the red "open here" tag running around a piece of string cheese. The boys equip themselves with "shark billys" and harpoon guns, my favorite of which festoons the top of the world's first free floating deep-sea submersible, the Bathyscaphe. Peaked with a unicorn's horn of such redundant capability that I have to quote:

"The depth gun was designed to secure whatever interesting animals we encountered, possible one of the Brobdingnanian squids that haunted our imaginations. The animals could be discouraged, not only by the harpoon, but by an electrical discharge running through the harpoon line. In case the specimen resisted electrocution, the harpoon head injected strychnine. At the base of the Picard-Cosyns gun were spring-driven reels for hauling in harpoons and monsters."

Like Swift, I'm all for gratuity - but clearly the designers of this gun have been reading too many Jules Verne novels. They've gotten caught in their own plot, and now find themselves seeing things with a vision that seems purely facilitating now, rather than actually accurate. Thank God they came before us, so that we could Do Right. Maybe not the truest statement in the world, but at least we're not clubbing baby whales on the backs of the heads in the name of science (got our own set of moral blunders to indulge in, after all...)

The pelagic Illiad continues, through both the movie and book versions of TSW, as we watch Cousteau dynamite entire shoals in order to catalogue their populations, spear dolphins to attract sharks (which are then clubbed to death, sharks being "the diver's natural enemy"), and dissect the manta rays that cruise above the divers like B-52 bombers, eclipsing the sun. Explorers are always gratuitous, and it is worth noting that Cousteau himself has, since his earliest explorations, been one of the primary and most effective proponents of underwater conservation. In this book, however, there is no ignoring the mediums' lessons. Language, like water, only appears to be traceless. What it describes, in this book at least, is a "pure" joy in discovery and movement that divers themselves will readily second - for as Cousteau himself says, "One of the greatest joys of sea bathing, perhaps not realized by many, is that water relieves the everyday burden of gravity."