What happens when four unstable personalities are trapped together in a tiny cabin on a boat lost and without power in the middle of the South Pacific? How does those four individuals deal with the constantly worsening situation as the boat starts to take on water and rot away? Do the couples wrap themselves up in petty jealousies and bickering? Do they blame each other when things start to go wrong? What happens when one of these people was a bit off his rocker to begin with? Can he really be blamed for what goes wrong? Consumed by paranoia, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, what if he abandons the slowly sinking ship and climbs onto another small sailing vessel? Will the couple on that vessel take him away from there – from where his wife was possibly plotting with another man to drown him in that mighty ocean?
In 1960, Charles Williams published “Aground,” a novel about a search for a stolen sailing ship, a ship that had run aground, gunrunning criminals holding a couple at gunpoint, desperation, and a romance that bloomed between an older sea captain with a gimpy leg and a twice-widowed blonde who was tougher than anyone could ever have imagined. In 1962, Charles Williams published “Dead Calm,” a novel in which he took these two characters, Captain John Ingram and Rae, had them trade the big vessel they recaptured in “Aground” and trade it for a smaller, sleeker, two-person sailboat and set them off on a months-long honeymoon jaunt around the world. At one point in “Dead Calm,” Rae actually sits down and tells the entire tale of the novel “Aground” to explain how she first met her husband and how neither one really like the other at first, but fell in love after five adventurous days in the Atlantic.
“They were nineteen days out of the Canal, bound for Tahiti and the islands to the south, tied to no schedule, free of the frustrations and annoyances of life ashore.” They found Warriner floating in a dinghy, who tells them his boat over there is sinking and everyone else on it succumbed to food poisoning. Ingram doesn’t quite buy everything this young man is selling. Something doesn’t feel right about things he says, how he says them. When Ingram goes to the other boat to look around, Warriner takes off with Rae still on Ingram’s boat, leaving Ingram behind on a leaking, sinking boat to pick up the broken pieces of what went on that second boat, marooned for ten days in the middle of nowhere with four people at each other’s throats. Ingram was “more scared then he had ever been in his life, and the whole scene came to him through the winy haze of a desire to get his hands on Warriner and kill him, but there was no time to give way to futile emotion.” He is told that Warriner is a lunatic, a crazy man, that there is no telling what he will do.
The descriptions that Williams gives of the sea and sky and the emotions running through Ingram and Rae are just perfectly written: “This might be the last time he would ever see her,” Ingram thinks, “this dwindling spot of color fading away toward the outer limit of binoculars, but that was something he couldn’t think about. If he lost his head, there was no chance at all.” “The air was like warm damp cotton pressing in on them, muggy, saturated, unmoving. Perspiration didn’t evaporate. It collected in a film over the body, a film that became rivulets, now running, now stopping momentarily, now moving again with the irritating feel of insects crawling across the skin.” You can really feel how Williams has matured as a writer in reading this – how he creates a feel for what it was like out there in the middle of the ocean with the sun burning down and no rescue anywhere in sight.
This is not a story of good and evil. Warriner is dangerous, but he is not just some mean, nasty criminal. Ingram and Rae already dealt with those types in “Aground.” Instead, Warriner is a crazy person. He is out of his mind. Part of the book is how Rae deals with someone who she just can’t reason with and how the people in this book choose whether or not to assign blame to someone who is out of his mind with paranoia. The characters here and how they relate to each other are extremely complicated.
It is one terrific, top-notch piece of writing and is a solid thriller. Great reading.
Most people are familiar with “Dead Calm” because of the Nicole Kidman movie that came out thirty years after the book. I can’t emphasize enough how different the book is from that movie and how much of a license the screenwriters took with changing the story and the characters. The book fleshes out all the characters (including the ones who never appear in the movie), their histories, and their complicated relationships. The movie makes the Warriner character just a simple bad guy, instead of a complex guy who is half-out-of-his- mind and perhaps not fully responsible for his actions. Rae is not young and helpless like the Kidman character and she doesn’t seduce the bad guy. Read the book. Skip the movie.
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