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Title: The Surfacing

Author: Cormac James

Narrator: Nick McArdle

Format: Unabridged

Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins

Language: English

Release date: 12-04-14

Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks

Ratings: 2 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Cormac James' The Surfacing is set on board a ship in the 1850s, searching for Franklin's lost expedition. It's a challenging and dangerous endeavour in a very male world - that is until Morgan, the second-in-command of the Impetus, realises there is a pregnant stowaway on board. It is too late to turn back, the ice is closing in, and the child will have to be born into the vast and icy wilderness of the Arctic.

Critic Reviews:

"Cormac James's writing is very assured, with a harsh poetic edge. His evocations of barren landscape, sea weather, pack ice, frozen skies are terrific. He takes the reader there." (Rose Tremain)

"The surfacing of love in the face of solitude." (Colum McCann)

Members Reviews:

Captivating

Interesting writing style which serves to further dehumanize the waiting and the suffering. From an 'away' perspective, the story requires that you keep reading.

Five Stars

Arrived in time, just can't seem to get into this book...it is a Book Club choice. Thanks

One Star

Horrible waste of paper and ink.

Another Best New Fiction Book of the Week Pick

Cormac Jamesâ hauntingly beautiful novel, The Surfacing, tells the story of the men on one of many English ships in the 1800s that explored the Artic in search of a previous failed expedition. They are making the voyage not because they have any real chance of success, but because âThe drawing rooms of London will not tolerate anything less.â No one but their reckless and vainglorious captain has any sort of enthusiasm for the trip; their ship reaches the rendezvous point last, meaning that they will be assigned the worst possible route; winter comes as early and brutally as it always does, and the ice closes in. Then they discover a stowaway onboard â a woman impregnated by the shipâs first mate.

Her presence, and especially the imminent delivery, only add to the first mateâs sense of claustrophobic dread. When at last it came time for his son to be born, he listens and imagines âa blank page being slowly torn in two. The rip has a will of its own, wanders off, like a fault line in a solid wall. Flaws appearing places she would have sworn were sound. But that solid surface â it is the merest skim of plaster over old cracks. Underneath, all the old wounds are still open, and the pain knows exactly where they are. It knows her better than she knows herself. It has been studying her secretly, all her life.â

This, then is the heart of the novel â the wounds that are still open and the pain that knows how to find them. Amid the austere magnificence of a relentless physical environment, the men and woman of the ship endure their fate with much fortitude and little complaint, perhaps because complaint would be trivial in a world like this one. With a near perfect unity of setting, style, emotion, and theme, James traps his characters, and the reader, squarely within that fault line just as the ship itself is trapped within the ice. There are dreams, of course, of a different sort of life, and those dreams serve only to intensify the desperation of their circumstances. âHe felt the breach between himself and them, the men of renown. He had read their books. For them, there had been far horizons, all around. He had gone to the windows they had looked through and found them walled up. . . .