Janice Clark

I almost didn't like this book. The details of setting are almost too kitschy, the narrative too rambling, the macguffin not compelling. It's not that I like the book despite those things, but rather that the good in this story pulls together everything else.

What won me over is the fidelity to the classic epic voyage. Not in the trip itself, because it's easy to write an odyssey, but in the tone. There is a brutality here, a driving force of thoughtless desire, inequality of character and opportunity, even incest and force. It is creepy, but on the same scale as when I first read of the 'seduction' of Leto. That creepiness is intentional and highly effective. The seeming amorality is unsettling, but in truth it is a morality too foreign to fully feel and comprehend. This is how I often feel about the myths of the greeks and their contemporaries. It is a rare and lovely thing to hear this story from the women who wait, who are used and discarded.

Long after I forget the details of the house and journey, I will remember my mental image of the Rathbones, bright-eyed and rapacious, the same way I remember my first view of a sleek mink feasting on its kill.

The biggest flaw in this book is the marketing. While it is a story about whalers, lovingly and carefully researched, it is in no way historical fiction. More of it is fiction than the individual characters; the landscape and history, the possibilities of existence themselves, have been created in the world of this story. I can imagine a reader expecting a story set in a realistic whaling community on the northeast coast feeling a bit confused and disappointed. This is not a fault of the story but of the constructed expectations.

Likewise, I would never classify this as magical realism. Well, that might be the current go-to descriptor, to the point where it's lost a lot of meaning, but I think readers have definite expectations of that label (maybe a few separate groups of expectations), and this book doesn't meet them. It's occasionally surreal; there are departures from the reality of this world, but they are subtle enough that they read like mistakes to some reviewers, irrelevancies to others. Again, reader disappointment that could have been avoided.

If pressed, I would say it's a story about desire and consumption. And I'd put it on a shelf marked 'books' and leave it at that.… (meer)

The night I finished reading The Rathbones I dreamed of water and ruin. I woke up this morning and had to remind myself that I'm in Kansas, not near the ocean and nowhere in the vicinity of a ship or a widow's walk.

Imagery of water, weirdness and whales flows through every page of The Rathbones. Janice Clark's art and design background makes it easy to visualize every detail in this weathered and somewhat scary world by the Atlantic. She is excellent at describing fabrics, clothing, architecture, environment, furnishings. I felt brined and excited to touch the ropes, the anchors, the sunbeaten boards of the deck. Clark is also gifted in important details like the characters' names -- Mercy, Mordecai, Verity, Hepzibah, Amaziah, Euphemia -- and in doing so she makes sure the reader is submerged in this saltwatery New England seacoast. These are the strengths of the book.

Motivation, empathy, laws of physics -- these are the weaknesses of the book. Although it's written in first person (mostly), I wasn't able to get inside Mercy's head at all. She's detached, robotic, and quite hard to empathize with. She is being chased through much of the book and although she is on the run for months, doesn't seem to care. At one point she has just been yelled at, told to leave, and is being assaulted with heavy objects thrown at her. She runs through the hall briefly to escape, then slips into the library to make commentary on the shape and content of the books there.

She narrates her tale with a neutral, glassy eye, making no emotional commentary even as she watches her mother die while having sexual intercourse with her father, who then repeatedly rams himself into the lifeless body. (awkward!) Mercy is the heroine of the tale but not easy to relate to or to like. I had a hard time getting through certain parts of the book because I never got to see her as human so therefore I didn't really care what happened to her.

Although I felt myself wholly engaged in the physical sights and textures of this world, I had a hard time figuring out its actual 'rules of physics.' Mercy's crows could pick her up and fly her places, but she hides in a trunk with them and crushes and kills one even though we are told repeatedly how tiny and light she is - there's no squawking, no show of strength from this bird? A wooden oar is tossed onto a rock and "shatters?" While a rowboat is sinking, a man uses a powdery substance to plug the hole? The scholar tries to tie his long hair back and accidentally knots himself to a ship's rigging? Mercy knows anatomy so well that she can assemble a human skeleton in the dark, who is only missing one bone, "the left ring finger?" I struggled with cartoons like these.

I loved the ambition of this novel and the promise of an epic adventure centering on a brave young girl. I would recommend it for a second reading, and I might go back and do that because it was hard to keep the plot straight for me this first time around. Although it wasn't perfect, I enjoyed my time in the islands reading waterlogged ledgers and feeling the spray of great whales swimming below the surface.… (meer)