NONFICTION - April 20, 1986

OFFSHORE: A NORTH SEA JOURNEY by A. Alvarez (Houghton Mifflin: $15.95). Despite the current petroleum glut, much of the world’s remaining available oil lies beneath the surface of some of the most inhospitable places in the world. A. Alvarez takes us to one of these areas--Shell Oil’s Brent Field, in the British sector of the North Sea.

In this frigid patch of ocean near the 61st parallel, the oceanographer’s hypothetical “hundred-year storm” of 100-foot waves and 160 m.p.h. winds roars through every few months. Seen from afar, Brent Field is a microscopic cluster of oil rigs isolated in a vast sea. Up close, seen through Alvarez’s keen eye, these huge offshore structures are an awesome hive of men (this is a strictly male province) working one- and two-week stints of 12-hour days at dangerous, dirty jobs, linked together by modern electronic technology.

There are layers of human life zones from the derrick man atop the rig to the roughnecks on the noisy, mud-smeared drilling platform, the helicopter pilots who fly through the worst of weather, down to the divers on the ocean floor. Says a scaffolder, whose Sisyphean task it is to paint and scrape the giant steel structures, life on the rigs is “like going through one of those black holes from one universe to another.”

Alvarez’s account of the characters who work in this universe is a wonderful armchair adventure, but it is also a useful and serious reminder of the real heroics, physical and technical, that it often takes to find and produce oil. We should never take it for granted.