There’s a frame narrative which announces immediately that this is to be a first-person account of a major military disaster at sea in which many lives were lost, which led to a Court Martial and a Board of Inquiry. So the main theme of the book is sketched out right at the start – there will be no suspense about this.
The narrator, Donald Ross, is brother to one of the men involved in the disaster and makes it plain in the first few pages that he has read all the documents available and interviewed all the survivors plus the officials who made the fateful decisions – so this will be an eyewitness account but embedded, as it were, in official discourse.
The plot
There’s an Army missile testing base on the (fictional) island of Lairg off the Outer Hebrides. As part of cost-cutting in Whitehall, officials decide it should be abandoned for the winter rather than expensively provisioned. But the order to do so is delayed while a bad weather front moves in. This is unexpectedly intense, creating a disastrous storm which causes a landing craft with 50 or so men aboard to founder in heavy seas, lose power and be dashed to pieces against one of the island’s treacherous cliffs.
Some of the men manage to clamber up the cliff to a spine of rock isolated from the island and completely exposed. A couple of men make it ashore and back to the mostly-abandoned base where they radio for help. The first attempt fails, as a parachutist is simply blown out to sea to drown. The second attempt by helicopter fails, when the helicopter is itself hit by a treacherous downburst of wind which smacks it into the sea. The third attempt is by tug and relies on the heroism of a Major Braddock who swims to the cliff with a rope, and then of a Captain Field, formerly a mountain climber, who scales the cliff with the rope. Thus they are able to rig up a harness to bring the shipwrecked men to the main island, and thence away on the tug.
In all 53 men are lost, along with the landing craft, helicopter and a large amount of military equipment, in an intensely described and harrowing disaster.
The personal angle
However, as with many of Innes’ adventure yarns the main incident is intertwined with a complicated personal backstory. In this case, everything revolves round the narrator Donald Ross, who is at the centre of events both public and private.
Although a painter by trade, he was formerly in the Royal Navy and then Merchant Marine. Why on earth does he travel up to the Naval Station supervising the withdrawal from Laerg, at a rather unpropitious moment? Because the officer who has been sent to organise it, one Major Braddock, turns out to be his long-lost brother, Iain.
His brother had served in the Second World War but was always a wrong ‘un, given to fighting and brawling, and he struck an officer while on active service. He was being brought back by ship to face charges when that ship was torpedoed and sunk with almost all hands. Donald mourned and got on with his life. Now a Canadian businessman turns up on his doorstep: a distant relative of Braddock’s in Canada has died and left him a pile of money. But the businessman’s wife is set to inherit if Braddock can be excluded from the will. Therefore, the businessman has been snooping into Braddock’s history, and especially into the wreck of the ship he was on, and he has tracked down and interviewed a number of other survivors and now he is convinced that the criminal Iain Ross, escaping the wreck on a liferaft with half a dozen others, murdered Braddock and stole his identity in order to escape prosecution.
In a further twist it turns out that Donald and Iain were both born and raised in the Highlands, listening to stories of their grandfather’s life and exploits as a native islander on Laerg, in the distant days before radio, oil or many boats, when the islanders lived a harsh and isolated life. Donald’s always wanted to see it for himself and now he has the motivation to combine it with seeing his brother. He withdraws all his money from the bank and catches the train north.
It is under these rather contrived circumstances that Donald meets his brother – or is it? – who refuses to acknowledge him, insisting on the name Braddock, before hitching a lift on one of the landing craft which are working a schedule of sailing out to Laerg to take off men and equipment to a regular schedule. The weather is rough but he’s allowed to go because none of them know about the disastrous storm which is brewing.
Disaster and rescue
These are the circumstances which bring the civilian painter Donald aboard the landing craft which is so harrowingly dashed in the terrifying storm and then smashed onto the pitiless rocks, who then staggers back ashore the island, and who helps with the three rescue attempts.
Thus it is that, once all the survivors are back on the mainland, Donald witnesses the press hounding of his brother, the officer in charge of the evacuation who, despite his heroic role in the final rescue attempt, is made the scapegoat for the disaster.
And thus it is that, in the strange atmospheric epilogue to the main disaster narrative, both brothers find themselves drawn back to Laerg for the final act in the tragedy, where Braddock reveals that he is Iain Ross, but tells the true story of what happened on that life raft 20 years earlier, and what the fate of the real-life Braddock truly was.
Sea descriptions
It takes a little while for the machinery of the narrative to get us there, but from about page 100 the description of the storm which wrecks the landing craft is breath-taking, awesome and terrifying. Innes was a sailor and this novel is up there with The Wreck of The Mary Deare and Maddon’s Rock for its grasp of the detail of seamanship. The text is threaded with intense and prolonged accounts of weather forecasting and meteorology, embodied in the well-worked-out character of Cliff Morgan, since the state of the weather is absolutely vital to the concatenation of decisions which lead to the disaster.
The account of the press victimising the wrong man and then of the court martial are reminiscent of the similar scenes in Maddon’s Rock where the narrator has to prove he didn’t mutiny to a court martial. There is something deeply reassuring, something very comforting about Innes’ pacing and about the way he devotes the same amount of effort to describing the details of the court martial as of the weather reports and sea conditions and build of the landing craft and and the geography and fauna of his isolated island.
But the last 50 pages of the novel make up a surprising and strangely tranquil climax to the plot in that, once Ross’s brother, Iain/Braddock, escapes from custody, Ross is so convinced he’ll make for the fateful island that he himself catches the first train north, buys a rubber dinghy and the necessary equipment, and then makes a ludicrously risky but evocative and beautifully described day and night’s voyage out to Laerg. Although he does meet his brother there, and all is revealed about what happened on the life raft 20 years earlier (and it is not good), for me the human element (the slightly soap opera element) in the story paled, melted away, by contrast with the factual, accurate, rooted, super-real yet also romantic and symbolic voyage across the flat empty sea, then into the darkest night, and then into impenetrable fog, before he finds himself coming ashore into one of the island’s many secret caves, which is also the location of the novel’s dark secret.
This is a powerful and evocative novel, well-made from seasoned timber, redolent with story and reeking of the treacherous Atlantic waves like a Hebridean fisherman’s boat.
Related links
- Hammond Innes Wikipedia article
- Independent obituary
- New York Times obituary
- Hammond Innes book covers on the Bear Alley website
Fontana paperback cover of Atlantic Fury
Books & Boots 