Lost at sea

Call me Persnickety. When a book`s title charts a clear course (Moby Dick!) and the subtitle restates this destination (white whale, ho!) I expect the text to drop anchor in the appropriate harbor. Tim Severin, though, sailed right past it.

An Irish reincarnation of Thor Heyerdahl, Severin leads expeditions into offbeat historical theories or the lives of legendary figures. Did medieval Irish monks sail to the New World? Severin bounds across the Atlantic in a leather boat ("The Brendan Voyage"). Did Chinese explorers visit America 2,000 years ago? Severin steers a bamboo raft across the Pacific ("The China Voyage").

"Tracking Marco Polo," "The Ulysses Voyage: Sea Search for the Odyssey," "In Search of Genghis Khan" - the author`s game plan was evident and his tales delivered. Here, though, Severin resorts to literary bait-and-switch. "In Search of Moby Dick" touches on Herman Melville and his fictional masterwork, as well as the novelist`s real-life inspiration, the whaler Essex, sunk by an enraged sperm whale in 1820. But "In Search of Moby Dick" is searching for another tale: The waning days of the South Pacific`s indigenous whale-hunters.

On four islands scattered from the Philippines to the Indonesian archipelago, Severin meets men who sail primitive rafts and boats, seeking ever-dwindling stocks of whales, whale sharks and giant manta rays. Their dangerous trade is shaped by desperate poverty. Many of the men are "jumpers," leaping into the sea and atop their prey, gaffing the startled creature with steel hooks. Why not throw a harpoon from a dry and relatively safe deck? The fishermen cannot afford to risk losing their precious tools.

At every stop, Severin describes the human costs of overfishing - villages beset by malnutrition, poverty and idleness. Off a southern Indonesian island, though, he had the good fortune to witness two epic encounters between fishermen and sperm whale pods. Yes, there are echoes of Ahab and Ishmael. But Melville`s men were engaged in a 19th-century high-tech trade, and business was booming. Severin`s men tell a radically different tale. And what of the purported object of this quest, Moby Dick himself? At every stop, the author asks about white whales; a few islanders have seen them, usually long ago. (The most recent sighting: 1992.)

"Very brave and very dangerous" is the consensus, and there are tales of albino loners rescuing their brethren from whalers. But Severin fumbles the issue. He doesn`t talk to any scientists. He doesn`t interview any modern whalers from Japan, say, or Scandinavia (even if you`re a Greenpeace rainbow warrior, you must admit these mariners know their cetaceans).

Just as frustrating, "In Search of Moby Dick" provides yet one more proof that I am not God: If I were all-powerful, books that need maps would - here`s a concept - have maps. Severin navigates huge swaths of the South Seas, from familiar ports to places you`ve never heard of (or has my divinity failed again, and you`ve just returned from Nuku Hiva?). But Basic Books issued this volume without so much as a back-of-a-cocktail-napkin map and scrapped the photos and drawings that were published in the British edition.

"In Search of Moby Dick" is a quick and engrossing sea tale, but it`s not the book it could have been or claims to be.

- Peter Rowe

"Nearer Than the Sky," by T. Greenwood; St. Martin`s Press; 320 pages; $23.95.

"I understand lightning." With these words, Indie Brown begins to tell her story. She tells how, when she was 4 years old, her mother left her sitting in the basket of a metal shopping cart filled with groceries, and went back inside the Foodmart. Indie, parked beside the family`s orange Chevy Nova, began eating chocolate cookies while she waited. Time passed. The air cooled and darkened and rumbled. Rain set in. Lightning began to crackle across the sky, frightening Indie. The rain came harder. She watched the doors of the supermarket open and close, but saw only an old man, a Foodmart cashier in a red apron and "a lady with a yellow umbrella opening above her like butterfly wings."

At this point in T. Greenwood`s novel, "Nearer Than the Sky," it is apparent there is something far more malevolent about this mother than the plain lack of good sense. From the beginning, the consternation of any reader with normal sensibilities has been provoked at the prospect of a mother leaving a 4-year-old alone in a parking lot under an Arizona sky in August, strangers coming and going around her. But when the mother finally emerges from the supermarket, only to stop and fuss over Indie`s baby sister, Lily, whom she did take into the store with her, while Indie sits in pouring rain, cookies soggy in her hand, thunder shuddering the cart - well, by then, the reader is practically wretched with the want to rescue this child.

Which is only a portion of the brilliance of the opening chapter in Greenwood`s second novel. Her debut, "Breathing Water," won the 1999 Sherwood Anderson Award for Best First Novel. Greenwood compels the reader into this small, but intense, drama and sets up the question: How could a mother do this to her own child? It`s a question that resonates throughout the book.

In the opening scene, the author establishes all the elements and themes that are explored in the pages that follow. Truth. Betrayal. The peculiarly special relationship between the mother and Lily - to the disregard of Indie. How distant the possibility of rescue can be. That unsettling question is raised in the reader`s mind for the first time, but not the last.

"Nearer Than the Sky" is a look inside a family marked by Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP). A parent with MSBP - usually, it`s the mother - has a twisted need for attention as the heroic caregiver of a sick child. Such a mother might demand her child be hospitalized, have exploratory surgeries, be given endless tests. She might make the child sick in order to seek treatment. Sometimes, the point of all this torture of small children is to achieve a perverse relationship with and matching of wits against doctors.

Indie is struck by lightning. Even years later, she is left, she says, with bad hearing in one ear and with the ability to taste sounds. Indie`s mother tells this incident differently.

"In her version of this story, of every story," Indie says, "she`s always the hero." But "her words taste like asphalt. Like aspirin. Like anything but the truth."

Greenwood writes that Indie, Lily and their brother Bennie listen to their mother`s stories in silence and try to believe.

"Nearer Than the Sky" alternates between the present, sometime in the `90s, and the past, Indie`s growing-up years. A phone call summons her back to Arizona, to her mother and to her sister. As Indie handles the events of the present, she relives what happened when she was a child - only now she has an adult`s comprehension.

Greenwood`s writing is lyrical and original. There is warmth and even humor and love. Her representation of MSBP is meticulous. The story is an uncomfortable one, but as the last line of the opening chapter points out, "In the white cold light moments of a storm, you`re bound to get at least a glimpse of the truth."

- Jeanne Freeman-Brooks

(c) Copley News Service

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Author: Peter Rowe