I went slowly out on deck, pausing a moment to see his heavy figure climbing the long iron stairway at the base of the derrick that led from pipe deck to derrick floor, climbing with a sort of punchy swagger. He flung open the corrugated iron door and stood there for a moment surveying the scene, a lone figure standing right above the pipe skid, the noise of the draw-works blasting out and the men inside dancing a strange ballet around the kelly, the tongs in their hand and the winches screaming.
(North Star, page 166)
Another in Hammond Innes’ long sequence of first-person narratives in which the hero is on the run from the police, has a troubled relationship with his father, has detailed technical knowledge of the sea and ships, but finds himself drawn by forces beyond his control into disaster.
The hero as suspect
Michael Randall was brought up in America by his mother and rich step-father but came to England to study at the LSE under a Marxist tutor. After getting his degree he went north to Hull to sign on as a trawlerman to see the practical side of politics and class war. It is the late 1960s and he gets involved in left-wing activism and organising strikes. One night, after outside agitators whip up a union meeting, he realises they are going to target the foreman’s house and goes there beforehand (typically, for an Innes hero, with no plan, just on a hunch), only to witness two agitators throw a petrol bomb through the window. Unfortunately, a little girl is in the house and Michael breaks in to save her, handing her over to the neighbours who’ve come rushing out.
Flustered, stressed, partly implicated insofar as he was at the original political meeting, Michael doesn’t stick around to talk to the police but makes for his trawler which departs before dawn.
When the trawler puts back into port after its fishing trip is complete, worried about the incident, Michael finds himself ‘drawn’ – like so many other Innes heroes – mysteriously drawn to a remote land, in this case to the Shetland Islands where he’s never been before, but where he knows his father once lived.
Here he discovers a) the remote church where his father is buried (touchingly, vividly described) b) that a trawler recently ran aground nearby in a storm, the old skipper dying of a heart attack. On an obscure impulse (the same unfathomable motivation of so many other Innes heroes) he borrows the money and sets out to repair the trawler, The Duchess of Norfolk. In doing so he finds himself attracted to the young widow of the old skipper, now the trawler’s owner. And then the two are brought together in business deal when the opportunity arises for The Duchess to become a supply ship to a new oil rig, North Star, which is being set up to drill in the dangerous deep water west of the Shetlands.
Complications
Slowly these disparate threads are wound together into a recipe for disaster.
Michael’s father is not dead. Michael discovers from old-timers on the islands that his father was rescued from Norway back in 1942, badly injured by shell fragments. He is profoundly shocked to discover him staying in a remote house, aloof, unfriendly, harshly disfigured. In an even bigger psychological blow, Michael discovers his rival to buy the wrecked trawler, a local man who’s lived in Shetland all his life, is also his father’s son, by a local Shetland woman – and so is his half-brother!
And his father is part of a terrorist conspiracy. He may or may not have been – or still be – a Russian spy (conversations about this, as about most other subjects in Innes’ texts, are circular, blocked, stymied, broken off, left unconcluded…). But he is certainly now mixed up with a gang of saboteurs, themselves linked to the IRA. (The ‘Troubles’ began around 1969 and by 1972-3, when Innes was writing, were in full swing.)
The IRA contingent are helping Marxist saboteurs who want to strike a blow at capitalism: specifically, they want to create an oil rig disaster, humiliating the gung-ho venture capital owner of the rig – Villiers – discrediting the new ‘oil rush’ in the North Sea, and causing an environmental catastrophe in the important Hebridean fisheries which will tarnish the whole oil industry.
Like so many Innes heroes, Michael finds himself pushed onto the wrong side of the law by obscure and tangled forces, sometimes of his own making. In the centre of the book, he is called on to testify against the men who threw the petrol bomb and, in a terrifyingly believable courtroom scene, we watch him get out-manoeuvred by his opponents who have bribed witnesses whose testimony persuades the judge and jury that the men on trial are innocent and that Michael did it. The fact that he didn’t stick around to talk to the police deepens suspicion against him.
When the case against the accused (and guilty men) collapses, Michael is himself arrested, cautioned and, eventually, released – for the time being – but now he has hanging over his head a) the threat of being rearrested, charged and tried at any moment b) the threat of revenge by the two men and their shadowy ‘revolutionary’ organisation, which he had the bravery/foolhardiness to confront.
Hence Michael’s wish to escape to sea, to be in international waters if the police come calling. He returns to Shetland, to take over the captaincy of The Duchess of Norfolk, to his ambivalent relationship with its owner – Gertrude – and to a typically uncertain and uneasy relationship with the buccaneering owner of the oil rig – Villiers – and the tough Texan oil-man who manages the rig. These guys already knew a little about his reputation as a union organiser but when news of the court case arrives, and the fact that he has been arrested and is only out on bail, then they fire him from the job of servicing the rig.
Like so many Innes heroes, Michael just can’t seem to break free from the squid-like tentacles of the past which block his efforts at every turn.
His deputy takes over captaincy of the Duchess and Michael finds work on the other ships in the area owned by his rival and half-brother, Sanderson.
Love life
There’s a lot more to it than this summary suggests: the text is a densely-printed 260 pages long, maybe that would amount to 400 pages of a modern, larger-print paperback. There are numerous scenes elaborating Michael’s troubled relationships with his father, with his employer and with the police.
And there is a powerful thread about his love life, about his troubled relationships with his attractive but superficial (and drug addict) wife, Fiona (an echo of the beautiful, bitchy wife who appeared in this novel’s predecessor, Golden Soak) representing his troubled political Past – and with the stocky, plain but appealing Scandinavian woman, Gertrude, who owns the damaged trawler (similar to the plain, chunky but honest female lead in Golden Soak), representing the Future.
I was staring at her, seeing her large-mouthed competent face, thinking how comfortable and practical she was in comparison with Fiona. (p.226)
They argue. They make up. She bosses him around. There’s an almost romantic moment, which is interrupted by a phone call, misunderstandings. Later, after the trial, Michael makes a pilgrimage to Gertrude’s house but she’s not there. On a later occasion Fortune favours them and, after an evening of food and wine and candlelight in her remote Shetland cottage, they finally make love. But then the newspapers of his trial arrive, spreading the accusation that he is an arsonist and almost-murderer, which makes her doubt him. And then he is sacked from the oil rig job, which brings their professional association to an abrupt end. And so on and so on…
Like most of Innes’ characters’ relationships – and like the narrative itself – his ‘love life’ is made up of hesitancies, delays, misunderstandings, moody silences, shrugs and postponements. It is during a fatal failure to go visit his wife during one of her drug-induced depressions, that she (surprisingly) kills herself with an overdose of barbiturates leaving Michael bitterly blaming himself…
The sea the sea
The sea is Innes’ preferred element and the setting of his greatest novels, The Wreck of the Mary Dear and Maddon’s Rock and The White South among them.
The descriptions of trawlers and tugs, of their heavy complex machinery, of chart reading and sailing, navigating and steering, as well as of the business of running an oil rig, are conveyed with great detail and conviction, owing much to Innes’ own years at sea. In addition there is his trademark thorough research – as with many previous novels, this one has an author’s afterword thanking the many organisations and experts who helped him with factual background.
Even if the motivation of the human characters often seems puzzling, wilfully obscure and not particularly plausible, his descriptions of dawn at sea or the Norwegian mate bringing the trawler round into a headwind or of riggers wrangling rig piping always ring completely true.
I went up to the pipe deck where the engineers and a whole gang of roustabouts were working in the glare of the spotlights to wind the new cable on to No. 4 winch. It would have been better if they could have rigged it on No. 1 winch, which was facing due west now, but as Smit pointed out to me, it had to be a winch within reach of one of the two cranes, since there was no other way of hoisting a 15-ton anchor out over the side. (p.238)
I admire Innes for writing book after book which pay such careful attention to the hard physical labour that generations of men have done, for his skill at conveying the pleasure and joy of expert men doing work they love and understand. There are descriptions of love and even a little sex in the novels; but the real love affair is between big gruff men – bearded Norwegian sailors, Yorkshire trawlermen, Scottish sea dogs, tough Texan riggers – and their all-consuming vocations.
Environmentalism
There had been intermittent prospecting in the North Sea in the 1950s but the scene was transformed in late 1969 and 1970 with the discovery of massive deposits of oil and natural gas. Drilling, mapping, supplying, shipping, refining all converged to create the huge industry which has been active for the past 45 years, and not without impact on the environment.
Early on in the book Innes mentions the famous Torrey Canyon disaster of 1967 when an oil tanker broke up, spilling vast amounts of crude oil along the Cornish coast. As an experienced sailor and a man devoted to the beauty of Nature, Innes was an early advocate of environmental issues, and awareness of the environmental impact of the dastardly plot to sabotage the North Star is a thread running through the book.
Politics in the early 1970s
It is difficult now to recapture the desperation of a time which has receded into history. In his author’s note Innes mentions that his plan to start the novel in 1972 and complete it by 1974 was overtaken by events, namely:
- a severe mining strike in 1972
- the October 1973 Yom Kippur War which led the OPEC countries to limit oil production and prompt…
- the oil crisis of October 1973 to March 1974 when the price of oil quadrupled
- leading to the imposition of a three-day week in the UK and
- a political crisis which caused two UK general elections in the same year (1974)
Crisis followed crisis with bewildering speed and political activists on the right and left felt the existing system was collapsing and only needed a few violent nudges to bring about the revolution they hoped for. Such as blowing up an oil rig.
Innes’ novel could hardly be more topical, weaving as it does the themes of industrial action and crippling strikes, of extreme and bitter political polarisation, with the widespread hope that North Sea oil would be a bonanza which would free the UK from dependency on Arab producers.
And stirs in the threatening presence of the Provisional IRA, at their most violent following the catastrophe of Bloody Sunday on 30 January 1972 (during 1972 alone the IRA killed 100 British soldiers, wounded 500 more and carried out 1,300 bomb attacks). Innes’ protagonist is right to feel very scared when he is ordered to a remote cove to load suspiciously unmarked crates from aggressive men with Irish accents.
The climax
The climax of the novel comes when Michael is tasked by his employer and half-brother with collecting these crates and sailing back out towards the North Star. As the ship makes its way towards the rig Michael is stripped of command by the gang and becomes a helpless witness to their plot to blow up the oil rig and cause a major disaster – and, with typical Innes overkill, all the time a major North Sea storm is closing in on the situation…
Do the saboteurs succeed? Is the rig blown up in a terrific fireball explosion at sea? What happens to all the crew aboard it and what happens to Michael?
You’ll have to buy the book, which is worth getting hold of for the gripping final 20 pages alone, worth reading for its descriptions of the Shetland islands and the stormy seas around them, vividly depicted in all weathers and moods, and for the detailed portrayals of men at work in hard physical jobs under extreme conditions.
Less so, perhaps, for its handling of characters who all seem incapable of decisive action or forthright conversations, or for the tone of dazed bewilderment, of obscure motivation and irrational impulses, which drive the perplexed protagonist through a plot which, despite all its naturalistic detail, often seems wilful and contrived rather than plausible or persuasive.
Related links
- Hammond Innes Wikipedia article
- Hammond Innes obituary in The Independent
- New York Times obituary
- Hammond Innes book covers on the Bear Alley website
Fontana paperback edition of North Star
Books & Boots 