Book review: Archipelago

But the Caribbean Sea can be full of danger: deadly currents, tropical storms, sharks and migrating whales – and it’s this that Monique Roffey chooses to focus on in her latest novel, which is every bit as challenging, dramatic and testing as its setting.

Gavin Weald is a man in trauma. A flood has destroyed his family home in Trinidad, robbing him of his wife and baby son and all the things around which his comfortable middle-class lifestyle was carefully structured. Struggling to care for his daughter, he questions what his future might be – and indeed whether he even wants one.

As his mental and physical state deteriorates, he makes the impulsive decision to recover his long-abandoned boat from its forgotten corner of the marina and head out to sea. The next day, in the space of a few hours, he stocks up on supplies and sets sail, along with his six-year-old daughter Ocean and their dog Suzy.

The boat represents everything Gavin fears he has lost: virility, health, ambition, clarity and optimism. The slim, old fashioned GD28 was once capable of making a long journey over open sea, but that was in the hands a young, fit, healthy man and an experienced companion. Even in his prime, Gavin never dared undertake a voyage of the kind he now seems fixed on following.

As the hurried preparations are being completed, there is the underlying suspicion, never expressed, that Ocean and Suzy have been brought along as some kind of insurance policy. As they sail away from Trinidad, he throws his mobile phone overboard. “Where are we going, Daddy?” asks Ocean. “When will we be there?… When are we going home?”. Her questions echo the reader’s growing doubts.

Her father sails on, not knowing the answers, unsure of his destination, island-hopping until he meets the point of no return, when he resolves to voyage across the open Caribbean Sea, through the Panama Canal and onward across the Pacific to the Galapagos islands. As for Gavin’s inner voyage, there is no immediate destination in sight, and no assurances of recovery. For all the thoughtlessness of his actions, Roffey maintains an empathy with him throughout.

In her last novel, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, which was shortlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize, Roffey took more of a detached approach to studying men under pressure. And in her first major novel, Sundog, the narrative, which followed a young man’s search for truth and connection with his father, most of the male characters were wilfully cruel, fecklessly ineffective or rocking dangerously between the two extremes. Neither has the finesse Roffey reveals here in her understanding of men in extremis.

As a writer, Roffey meets the challenge confidently, structuring her narrative adeptly and holding the reader’s attention throughout. As the novel progresses, we are invited to condemn Gavin a little less and understand him a lot more. In his inner dialogue we catch the dilemma of a man living in a world where every action is expected to be executed perfectly and confidently, while dealing with feelings of isolation, self-doubt, fear and shame.

Out on the open sea, where his decisions become a matter of life or death, we see that for all his self-loathing, he is motivated by two kinds of love – an aching longing for his dead wife and a profound love for his daughter. All of which comes on top of more traditional elements of sea-faring adventure. It’s a powerful story of endurance and triumph in the face of adversity, and one that also offers answers to questions of how we might respond in a rapidly changing world when things start to go wrong.

Archipelago

by Monique Roffey

Simon & Schuster, 368pp, £14.99

• Monique Roffey is at the Edinburgh book festival on 15 August.