Name: The Voyage
Rating: 4 (1 reviews)
ISBN: 9780679768395

Philip Caputo

At the turn of the century, three teenage boys leave their Maine home at the orders of their father, Cyrus Braithwaite, and embark on a voyage down the Atlantic coast, an adventure that years later reveals truths about the Braithwaite family to Cyrus' great-granddaughter.

The Voyage

Edwin Lang

I will start first off with the rating: I gave this four-stars because it is such a well put together novel – it is challenging as there are, for example, a lot of technical boating terms as much of the story takes place on the schooner. It is also challenging because there is a darkness throughout the story. It starts with Cyrus, the father of three boys (Nathaniel – 16 years old; Eliot, something of a wit, 15; and Drew, the scholar, 13) sends them off on his beloved schooner – the Double Eagle – telling them not to return home or go to Boston (where his wife, their mother, has gone for a medical procedure) until school is scheduled to begin again in September, that is for the entire summer. For Cyrus it is a decisive moment but the boys are baffled by their father’s seeming coldness in giving them an order, delivered in such an authoritarian manner. It marks the beginning for us of an excruciating but rewarding read. They pick up another crew member (Will Terhune), a school mate of Nate’s and ultimately decide to sail down to the Florida Keys where there is buried treasure from a ship that their father, years ago, had tried to salvage. It is an adventurous trip and a brutal one, and forms the core of the entire book. It is not so much that we meet each of the characters individually, but see these relative innocents tossed about by the imperious and unrelenting ocean and by society as a whole. There is very little love, except for the crew’s respect for one another and their skills. As a reader though, we are pretty worried all the way through and this makes the reading quite a slough: it is never boring but it is also never easy. Philip Caputo, the author of The Voyage, obviously put a lot of research and effort into crafting the book, and maintains suspense until the very last twenty pages or so when he slowly unravels the essence of the story. By this time we have gotten to like the boys and have developed an understanding of their mother and the rational for their father’s behaviour. It all fits like a well-made jigsaw. An excerpt from the book’s epigraph from Joseph Conrad says it all though: ‘… impenetrable and heartless the sea has given nothing of itself to the suitors of its precarious favours …’ and in a review Caputo reflects that life for some people, at least what we see of them and their families, is simply the tip of an iceberg. I recommend The Voyage simply as a good story, well told, although it is something of a moralist’s tale: don’t keep secrets. It is good to be reminded, I think, that our actions have consequences. I write this as we are all suffering the Coronavirus-19 pandemic, and even though everything is shut down (except for the essentials: grocery stores, liquor and beer stores, Walmart and the nearby DollarStores) it is warming to see couples and families out for walks together and sense the imposed quiet – few planes, trains or automobiles about, and the environment overall feels likes it is healing. It’s Spring and the birds are back, and singing. Caputo has Sybil, a great-great-granddaughter revisiting the family history before she, just divorced, moves out West (and thus abandoning the Ocean that had formed and developed the family) tell us why that there is this sense that this once great, dynamic and prosperous family is no more, although there remain many members of it scattered about who do arrange to meet annually, and that the core that had once given it its power and meaning appears to be no more. I guess to some degree it is an Original sin story. But as Caputo says in an interview I mention below ‘The brutality in these stories gives the tenderness meaning. As there can be no faith without doubt, no courage without fear, so there cannot be redemption without sin’. Although I have to wonder that if Philip Caputo wrote such a story today he might have to acknowledge the argument that the Devil made me do it – “how could I resist the Devil when I can’t resist a man?” – might today sway an otherwise angry and disappointed God. One has the sense though that Caputo (in 1999 when he wrote the book, and when he was 58 years old) was practicing the Alice Munro / Hemingway “Iceberg” theory about writing: as an iceberg derives its power from the parts of it that are submerged, a work of fiction is stronger for what is implied rather than stated directly (see <a href="https://www.thenationalbookreview.com/features/2019/9/27/qampa-legendary-vietnam-war-writer-phil-caputo-on-his-new-novel-in-stories/" rel="nofollow noopener">2019 National Book Review interview with Philip Caputo</a>). Although women are prominent in the telling of the story and in the centrality of the drama, it is a man’s book conceived and written by a man, as Philip Caputo reflects in the NBR interview mentioned above, raised by ‘(his) father, the Jesuits and Marine drill sergeants’. A couple of excellent reviews can be found at these sites: <a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/philip-caputo/the-voyage/" rel="nofollow noopener">Kirkus May 2010 Review of The Voyage</a>) and, for a longer one, at <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/23792/the-voyage-by-philip-caputo/9780679768395/reading-guide/" rel="nofollow noopener">Random House Book Club review of the book</a>. Edwin

The Voyage

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