The Last Sailor, Sarah Anne Johnson
Allow me to begin with a (possibly familiar…) disclaimer. Sarah Anne Johnson and I attended the same MFA program. I’ve known her since the turn of the century, though our contact has been spare and confined to social media. Even so, I’ve always liked her and esteemed her abilities as a writer. So can you trust this review? I can only say this — if I didn’t like The Last Sailor, I wouldn’t review it (see note).
My reading year began and, now, ends on the early 19th Century North Atlantic coastline, opening with Michael Crummey’s The Innocents and closing with Sarah Anne Johnson’s The Last Sailor. Both tell of the hard life purchased by those who wrest their living from an unforgiving sea.
The Last Sailor’s Nathaniel Boyd, eldest son of Yarmouth Port’s wealthiest landowner, lives alone in a shack he’s erected at the edge of town, solitude a salve for the drowning death of his youngest brother, a tragedy for which he holds himself responsible. His saving of an injured girl, Rachel, draws Nathaniel out of seclusion and into the life of Meredith Butler, his once-fiancée, who takes the girl into her home. Middle brother Finn Boyd’s attraction to the girl turns by degrees more obsessive, his actions toward her more malign.
The conflicts that assail these characters provide this novel its depth. Nathaniel rediscovers his yearning for Meredith, but has he the right to pursue her, given his abandonment of her years earlier? And does Meredith, now ensconced in an passionless marriage, have the right to encourage his interest? Rachel desires to find in Yarmouth Port a sense of home, but can she put shut of past wrongs done to (and by) her? Finn — ambitious, impulsive, overconfident — wishes to command a fleet of schooners but cannot command his father’s affection. Each of these reads real as life, scarred and scoured by the wrongdoing and hardship that attend being human.
Johnson is a master at conveying sense of place, writing of the North Atlantic seaboard with a painter’s eye and a poet’s pen:
Nathaniel rowed toward the jetty, working with a slow motion, letting the boat find its own momentum. The mast of a schooner came into view, then the jetty rocks, slabs of granite stacked like rubble. He rowed alongside them, the slap of the water ringing in his ears, the smell of brine and dried seaweed and broken clamshells with the meat picked clean overwhelming his nostrils. The tide shifted beneath him and swept his boat into the harbor. Familiar sounds struck him, the business of the docks: the creak and strain of a yardarm lifting crates, the clomp of horses pulling wagon carts, and seagulls squawking their comments on the entire scene as if they were the last and final word, angels speaking divinity.
I was once lucky enough to be in the room when the writer Pam Houston offered her view on the possibility of a literary happy ending. Such were possible, she argued, if that happiness were afloat in a sea of sadness. (Note: these are my awkward words — I’m sure whatever Houston said was far better put!) Sara Anne Johnson, it seems to me, has refined Houston’s formula. Happiness, she suggests, is achievable but will be a boon enjoyed by damaged selves, marked as we are by the world’s harshness and the frailties of the people we’ve been.
Crummey’s The Innocents, in which nature in the form of puberty upends the lives of a stranded brother and sister, served warning as we stepped into this unlucky year. We are inevitably the world’s playthings. The Last Sailor assures that we might make some contingent peace with harm as we stumble into the coming year.
Buy Sarah Anne Johnson’s magnificent new work at your local bookseller’s (preferred) or at bookshop.org, an online retailer that devotes part of its profits to supporting independent bookstores.
Note: I recently experienced a sharp example of the hazard inherent in reviewing books by people you know. I agreed to review the second published book by a family friend, an individual close to my writer spouse. Suffice it to say I disliked it, finding it nicely written but poorly researched, dishonest, and naive. Indeed, I disliked it to the point that I did some of the research the writer herself ought to have done, in order to gauge the degree to which she’d fallen short. My review was blistering. But you won’t find it on this site — when time came to click the “post” button, I could not bring myself to undermine my spouse’s friendship. For this reason, going forward, I’ll do many fewer of these. In truth, it’s my role to warn readers away from bad books as much as it is to direct them toward good ones. In allowing relationships to prevent me from posting certain reviews, I’m doing only half of my job.
