We, the Drowned

It started off strong. I really liked Laurids, and the description of the battle and the aftermath. I also liked how the author used the collective “we”, it was a good writing style. But chapter 2, where it moves on to the town's kids, slowed way down and I lost interest. It probably picks back up but I don't have the energy to scan the book, looking for it to get good again.

The decision to start reading this book was akin to the decision to learn another person. I fell massively in love and am missing the place and the people and the sea badly now that I have finished this masterful book.

There are bits of this book I really liked but, on finishing it, my feeling was one of meh! The final WWII section piled one incredible coincidence upon another - to the point where I assume the intention was to turn the entire story into just another of Herman's tall-tales.

It is a big book, but not an epic story.

I went into my reading of We, the Drowned with certain expectations. Not only was I anticipating an epic, gorgeously written story, but I was expecting a journey on the seas with one character to all ends of the earth. I don't know where I picked up this impression that We, the Drowned was largely about Albert, who searches the world for his lost father—even the novel's blurb alludes to a story much larger than Laurids and Albert—but that was what I expected nonetheless.

Because it wasn't what I wanted, I was disappointed in We, the Drowned. Now how petty is that? At least I'm honest. The story I wanted was nearly seven-hundred pages of a son searching for his father. There would be wonderful character building and a quest that would captivate me until its resolution. Also, there would be monsters and flying ships and unexplained occurrences because not only was I confused about the plot, but somehow I had it in mind that this was heavy in magical realism. Hmmmm. Expectations be damned. Let's just throw my expectations out and start over.

We, the Drowned is structured more like a novel in stories than a traditional novel. There's the episode of Laurids who nearly dies in battle, but miraculously survives unscathed. There is the story of his son, Albert, and his upbringing without a father who mysteriously disappeared. Then there is Albert's adventurous journey on the sea in search for his father. And then there are five hundred more pages. What I thought was the entire subject of the book is resolved in under two hundred pages. There's much more to this book than Laurids and even Albert. Each subsequent story is loosely tied into the stories that preceded it, but they span time and the globe. The thread that unites these stories have more to do with the town of Marstal and the oceans than they do with a singular event or character.

With its fragmented nature, We, the Drowned fails to be the huge epic I imagined, but that does not mean it doesn't succeed in other ways. Jensen's novel utilizes place and object how I expected it to use character and story. Not only are all these tales connected to Marstal, a town which inhabits the story as much as its characters inhabit it, but they're connected to the sea and the professional of seafaring. These are more vital to the story than any character. Once one has forgotten the names of Laurids and Albert, Klara, Knud Erik, Sophie, Herman, one still will recall the name of Marstal. They'll remember the journeys even if they've forgotten which crew sailed on them. And they'll recall the objects—the shrunken head, the boots, the vision of a bird—that outlast all but terrain itself.

It is the vivid settings and strange objects that truly occupy We, the Drowned and take the reader on an adventure. This isn't the timeless quest of a man looking for a father, it is the story of a town that strives to survive and a professional that is as old as time itself.

This is an epic story of three generations of sailors from the seafaring town of Marstal, Denmark. It is narrated alternately from a third person omniscient point of view and from the point of view of an unnamed Marstaller, which gives the impression that the town itself is narrating the story. Unlike some of my favorite seafaring novels, this book does not romanticize the life of a sailor–many of the characters, both at sea and on land, are brutal, and the conditions awful. I wondered whether I would make it through the whole book. But by the time I was sailing through Polynesia with Albert Madsen, in search of his father, the story had hooked me and I had to stay with it. I felt kinship with the youngsters in the story who survived their first brutal voyages as ships boys and came to realize that the sea had a hold on them that they did not want to escape.

This is a strange and wonderful novel.

The cover is beautiful and the typography is perfect and somehow together they made me think
that this novel was a seafaring version of Warlock or a more readable Moby-Dick or maybe (more fancifully) along the lines of Joshua Allen's Chokeville, but sadly it is not. This was enjoyable to read and worth it if you are ready to spend just under 700 pages with a few generations of people from Marstal, Denmark in the form of their stories told in a range of depths and interestingness in an easy-going narrative style, without that extra punch that would make this a literary door-stop. It was the kind of book that you can read so fast that you skip over words and not miss anything. It‰ЫЄs readable and imaginative and fun and violent and sad, but for the most part everything is laid bare – there doesn‰ЫЄt seem to be much under the surface that the book leaves the reader to discover on their own. A lot of telling without showing.

It‰ЫЄs a bunch of men going to war and boys growing up and teenagers going to sea and a man searching for his father and lonely people becoming family and men going to war again and then again. One woman out of anger and bitterness trying to change a town‰ЫЄs future and then realizing that she was wrong. Lovers coming together after years apart. People dying violently and ships being destroyed.

The story is told in a mix of first-person plural, first-person singular, and third-person omniscient. The shifts were necessary but sometimes confusing, and they made the whole seem a little harder to swallow, especially where it wasn‰ЫЄt clear when that shift occurred. The first-person plural was very effective in portraying a sense of the oral tradition and imagined history, which is great, but I would have liked it more had it been first-person plural throughout, focusing on the collective understanding and impression of events. But then of course you couldn‰ЫЄt get into as much depth with personal relationships and you couldn‰ЫЄt effectively describe events that take place on a ship, and then you‰ЫЄd have a much shorter and tighter book – you‰ЫЄd lose the sense of a sprawling epic history of a time and place.

On that note, however, although this book gives the impression of a sprawling epic, based on the length and the range of years it covers, it really isn‰ЫЄt. There isn‰ЫЄt much historical depth and I never really felt like I could see what Marstal was like in my mind, or understand how it would feel to walk down its streets. Having that more strongly conveyed would have been nice, but the novel went for range, I think, more than depth.

—

There comes a time in the life of a sailor when he no longer belongs ashore. It's then that he surrenders to the Pacific, where no land blocks the eye, where sky and ocean mirror each other until above and below have lost their meaning, and the Milky Way looks like the spume of a breaking wave and the globe itself rolls like a boat in the midst of the sinking and heaving surf of that starry sky, and the sun is nothing but a tiny glowing dot of phosphorescence on the night sea.

I was filled with an impatient longing for the unknown, and there was a ruthlessness to it .... Mystery emanated from the Pacific's vast surface. My papa tru must have felt it once. And when a man has felt it, he doesn't return.

I was reminded of a summer's evening on the beach back home. The wind had died down and the water was completely calm. In the dusk light, sea and sky had taken on a violet tinge and the horizon had melted clean away, leaving the beach as the only fixed point, its white sand marking the farthest edge of the world, beyond which lay endless violet space. When I took my first stroke, I felt as though I was swimming straight into the immensity of the universe above me.

That night on the Pacific I had the same feeling.

Isaksen had consulted the compass and plotted the course. He'd spoken eloquently about our ability to navigate through life even when it was at its hardest, but he'd overlooked one essential thing about the art of steering a ship. You don't just keep your eye on the compass; you also check the rigging, you read the clouds, you observe the direction of the wind and the color of the current and the sea, and you look out for the sudden surf that warns of a rock ahead. It may not be like that on board a steamer. But that's how it is on a sailing ship, and in this respect its journey parallels that of life: simply knowing where you want to go isn't enough, because life is a windblown voyage, consisting mainly of the detours imposed by alternating calm and storm.