Description
Every shipwreck narrative arrives with a moral attached, usually some version of endurance as virtue. Sophie Elmhirst resists this almost perversely. Her subject is Maurice and Maralyn Bailey, whose boat was holed by a dying sperm whale in the Pacific in March 1973 and who spent 117 days on a life raft before a Korean tuna trawler happened, on a hunch, to turn around — but her interest lies in the marriage under the ordeal, and in what that marriage reveals about the fantasy that put them there.
The fantasy was self-sufficiency. Maurice was a printer in Derby, gloomy, hunched, a man who had spent his twenties alone in a dark flat and called it “a pattern of detached bachelorhood.” Maralyn was a tax-office girl with a Vauxhall Cresta who seemed to know how to do things. She proposed one wet evening in 1966 that they sell the bungalow and buy a yacht. Six years later, carrying two printers’ savings and Maurice’s sextant, they sailed south out of Southampton with no radio and no plan to return. They were going to reach New Zealand. They were going to owe no one anything.
What Elmhirst sees, and what gives the book its spine, is that this project was always a disguise. Maurice wanted to escape England because he wanted to escape himself, and Maralyn wanted to escape Ada’s donkey stone and shelled peas; neither, strictly, needed an ocean. The boat was a way of formalising a need they already had for each other. When the whale arrived, and the raft was deployed, their stated philosophy — freedom from obligation — was inverted completely. They depended on each other every hour. They were rescued only because Captain Suh of the Wolmi 306 overruled his exhausted crew. Elmhirst’s Author’s Note puts it plainly: they lived through interdependence, the thing their voyage had been designed to refuse.
Maurice supplies the documentation, which is the book’s gift and its complication. He wrote constantly — logbooks, letters, three published accounts, a late box of self-published memoir that nobody wanted. Elmhirst quotes him on his refusal to have children: “I try not to do things I cannot do well.” The sentence is a whole worldview. He set his standards so high that failure was the only possible outcome, then confirmed the failure daily. On the raft, he gave up being skipper within forty-eight hours because he could not, under those conditions, be the person he required himself to be. Maralyn took over. She wrote menus. She made playing cards from torn pages of the logbook. She kept him alive by refusing to let him stop.
Maurice is the book’s centre of gravity. That is also the problem.
Because Maurice’s voice survives in such volume, the book knows him from the inside — his self-loathing, his late fixation on bell-ringing, his quiet fondness for a GP whose house he would drive past. Maralyn, who wrote lists more than letters and joked instead of confided, remains a kind of bright opacity. Elmhirst acknowledges this obliquely but never quite reckons with how much of Maralyn’s optimism might have been costume rather than character. The scene where Maralyn, dying of cancer, asks her half-sister Pat in the night about the child she never had — that is where another Maralyn briefly surfaces, and one wishes Elmhirst had pressed harder there.
Part Four strays. Elmhirst compares marriage to being stuck on a raft with someone and trying to survive, and for a page or two, the prose swells into the kind of universalising voice common to literary essays of the past decade. The Baileys’ marriage is too specific — too odd — to serve as a stand-in for the institution. Most marriages do not feature a husband who severs himself from his mother’s funeral or a wife who organises tinned food by felt-pen code. When Elmhirst reaches for the universal raft, the specific marriage she has built goes slightly out of focus.
And yet. The final third, after Maralyn’s death, is the book’s strongest material. Maurice at the Lyndhurst tea house, pocketing a clean paper napkin each Sunday to place in a drawer with all the other napkins he had taken on previous Sundays. Maurice wrote twenty-five letters about Maralyn to a friend who had declined to live with him. Maurice explaining, with the precision of a man who once arranged blocks of type in mirror image, “I write essays, and because nobody reads my essays, I send them as letters to people.” Grief here is clerical rather than lyrical — napkins in drawers, letters to a recipient who never replied, a Sunday routine built around the one table Maurice would accept.
What lingers from the book is not the whale or the safety-pin fishhooks or the turtle blood in the plastic bowl. It is Maurice, years later, pushed in a wheelchair along a cliff path above the Solent, looking down at a strip of water he once crossed under his own power — a man who had built his life on wanting no one, bundled in a blanket by a neighbour, grateful for the push.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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