Book Review : Reality, Fantasy Afloat on a Slave Ship

The Closest Possible Union by Joanna Scott (Ticknor & Fields: $17.95; 290 pages

Ostensibly, and for awhile, “The Closest Possible Union” is the tale of 14-year-old Pom, who ships out as a privileged cabin boy aboard the Charles Beauchamp, a sailing ship financed by his father, a wealthy New London merchant.

Almost at once, it becomes evident that the ship is, in fact, a slaver bound for the Guinea Coast of Africa.

The events or what seemed to be the events in Joanna Scott’s second novel are minimal. Pom is befriended by Piper, the cook’s mate; he is treated amiably, though erratically, by the captain, and he is regarded with tolerant aloofness by the crew. One of the sailors, Peter Gray, turns out to be a woman in disguise; the captain takes her into his cabin and, from time to time, she favors Pom with a partial sexual initiation. Pom also receives tentative sexual attentions from the captain, Piper and some of the crew.

The ship reaches Africa, takes on a complement of slaves and heads toward Brazil. Before it gets there, the crew appears to mutiny, abandoning the ship and leaving it to Gray, Piper, a missionary who has come on board, and the slaves. By the end, the ship seems to be drifting, and the slaves may be cooking and eating the captain.

Cloudy Story

“Seems,” “may be.” From the start, the story is clouded, diverted and deliberately undermined by wild improbabilities. Pom’s narration seems factual at times, but at others, it takes on the quality of hallucination. And Pom’s head is filled with a variety of contradictory tales.

Piper tells him stories about the captain’s eight wives, most of whom come to a violent end. A large box is unaccountably buried at sea. Pom is not certain whether it contains rancid pork or one of the wives; later, he will find a wedding ring and some bloody rags in the captain’s cabin.

Gray tells him that she has come aboard to seek out a half-brother, Quince, a mulatto who has gone to Africa to become a slave wholesaler. The captain and the missionary tell him terrible and contradictory stories about Quince’s bloody deeds; at one point, he emerges as a 400-pound African monarch. Yet when the slaves are loaded and Quince appears, he is a shriveled dwarf. The crew attacks him and throws him into the sea.

Both the events and the narration grow increasingly garish and dispersed. Pom’s companions seem real and then less real. Sometimes he feels secure and assured, since he is the owner’s son. Sometimes, he feels himself the victim of an all-embracing and impalpable plot.

“A boy on his father’s slaver has to contend with so many uncertainties,” he reflects. “Not every man in the middle of the Atlantic is bound by contract and title to the Charles Beauchamp.”

Like a Dream

There is an oddly prosaic note here; it disorients us and alerts us at the same time. Pom imagines a mutiny brewing; he warns the captain against Gray, Piper and the missionary. His suspicions are as insubstantial as a dream message; yet his warning precipitates things, as a word in a dream can do. It is like the passage in “Alice in Wonderland” where Alice denounces the royal Heart family as a pack of cards, and suddenly that’s all they are.

More and more, Pom’s cloudy narration confuses the captain and the ship with his own father. More and more, he appeals to his mother. And finally we begin to suspect that the whole trip is imaginary. There is a suggestion that Pom, in fact, is hiding in his attic to avoid his father’s anger, and that his story is a waking dream. Yet if it is a dream, he is stuck in it. His options, he says, are to desert by sea to a pirate ship, “Or to desert by way of my mind and return home.” But they are not real options; only something to be fantasized about as he remains becalmed on a shipful of cannibal slaves.

“It is comforting,” he says, “to admit that one day I shall sit again at the kitchen table and listen to my little sister play in the yard, and I’ll laugh to myself at the thought of this difficult voyage to Africa that I never took, the imposter Peter Gray who never existed, the dolphins and flying fish that I have never seen and probably never will.”

But he is still on the ship. Real or dream? We get no clear indication. Yet nothing is so real as a dream from which we can’t awaken. Why can’t he awaken? Perhaps it is the reality of the father’s slave investments that has planted this inexorable and inescapable nightmare in his son’s head.

No Fixed Points

Scott’s first novel, “Fading My Parmacheene Belle,” operated in a state of high suggestiveness; with events and their opposites, thoughts and their negations, twining in and out of each other. But there was a minimal governance, a line faintly chosen so that the reader could think: certain things happen, even if just how and why are ambiguous. Scott’s teeming clouds of imagery had a few fixed points against which they could condense.

With “The Closest Possible Union,” suggestiveness has taken over almost entirely. There is beauty in it but also an advanced degree of tracklessness. Someplace in the multi-colored thickets something important is happening, but the eye gets only vague clues as to where to look.