Atlantic by Simon Winchester Harper, HK$224
British journalist, geologist and US resident Simon Winchester, the man behind an ever-increasing number of historical nonfiction New York Times best-sellers, remains devoted to the ideals of 'freedom, the New World, adventure'. And, in the spirit of this physical and intellectual expansion, his books - and their titles - keep getting longer. His latest, Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, may, at 498 pages, be 14 pages shorter than 2006's A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, but its author's enthusiasm never flags, and the adjectival extravagance again dizzies.
Winchester travelled to Brazil, Greenland, Morocco, Namibia, Newfoundland, Norway, and a score of wind-whipped outposts to research, survey, and muse upon the Atlantic, 'an industrial ocean of cold and iron and salt, a purposeful ocean of sea lanes and docksides and fisheries, an ocean alive with squadrons of steadily moving ships above, with unimaginable volumes of mysterious marine abundance below'.
The result is not so much a biography of the Atlantic, but of the human perception of it, an ocean once regarded by mariners 'with a mixture of awe, terror, and amazement'. At core, Winchester's perceptual prism is Victorian. He invests the natural world with Dumasien ?lan, a degree of affect antithetical to today's scientific reductionism. Like cloud enthusiast Gavin Pretor-Pinney, angler Chris Yates, forest ranger Colin Elford, and Prince Charles, he is a figurehead of the neo-transcendentalist literary vogue triggered by impending ecological crisis: that of the celebration of nature.
Interestingly, the movement is predominantly male. Landscapes are tethered to accounts of primarily male exploits - angling, farming, and so on - and, ultimately, presented as backdrops to male villainy and heroism. (Nan Shepherd's critically acclaimed classic, The Living Mountain, is tellingly devoid of swashbuckling.) Winchester writes for men (the Drake Passage, for example, 'resembles an iron-plate exit wound from an eastbound bullet'). Women are of significantly less interest, and, when they appear, are squealing, confused, dancing for male gratification, or clad in bikinis ('middle-aged ... excitable ladies all a-twitter', and so on).
His scholarship, however, is impeccable. Mare Atlanticus has, Winchester reports, remained the same for 10 million years, stretching 'from the Stygian fogs of the north to the Roaring Forties in the south, riven with deeps in its western chasms, dangerous with shallows in eastern plains, a place of cod and flying fish, of basking sharks and blue-finned tuna, of gyres of Sargasso weed and gyres of unborn hurricanes, a place of icebergs and tides, whirlpools and sandbanks, submarine canyons and deep-sea black smokers and ridges and seamounts, of capes and rises and fracture zones, of currents hot, cold, torrential, and languorous, of underwater volcanoes and earthquakes'.