The Sharks : The History of a Crew and a Shipwreck
From the Publisher
Review by Elizabeth A. Schultz, University of
Kansas
Review by Alison Lewis
Review by Hans Christian Andersen, University of
Northumbria
Excerpts
More about The Sharks on this site
Jens Bjørneboe (1920-76) was one of the most controversial figures of his day; outspoken and anarchic, he clashed with most social institutions in his determination to challenge repression, censorship and authoritarianism. Novelist, poet, playwright, journalist, and essayist, he poured forth a steady stream of works which were as provocative in their subject matter as they were innovative in their form.
The Sharks (1974) was Bjørneboe's last major work. Set at the end of the last century, it is a thrilling tale of mutiny and shipwreck, which bears comparison with Melville's Moby Dick or Conrad's Typhoon in its suspense and its evocation of the fascination of the sea. It is also the story of mankind's voyage into the twentieth century, suspended between the empty skies and the bottomless depths, dreadfully aware of its potential for self-destruction but clinging to a belief in the preservation of a fragile humanity. The narrator, Peder Jensen, is both competent second mate and unworldly philosopher, whose brain "lacks walls, a floor and a roof". Through his eyes we follow the dismantling of the rigid power structure on board as a community begins to emerge.
A sea adventure worthy of comparison to Conrad and Melville, The Sharks tells the tale of "the last, meaningless, incomprehensible voyage" of the bark Neptune. The novel is set in the year 1899; the issues of diversity, violence, oppression, love, and interdependence presented are familiar concerns for contemporary readers at the end of this century.
The narrator is Neptune's second mate Peder Jensen, a sailor who is afraid of the sea and yet can not leave it: "This is my fate and my curse: to love what I hate." The polarity, and ultimate union, of opposites is a theme which runs throughout this allegorical book. A white European, Jensen is in a privileged position as officer aboard a British ship. He gains our sympathy by being aware of his privilege and resisting the role of oppressor. He feels a revulsion toward his sometimes cruel and greedy fellow-officers and is supportive of the crew, "that strange assemblage of folk from every corner and edge of the globe, of every colour and race, denizens of the whole world's docks and ports." As the crew moves toward mutiny, Jensen is caught in the middle of the power struggle between groups.
Throughout the book, Bjørneboe acknowledges the inextricable connections between people and the mixture of good and bad in all of us. Jensen learns that he can not truly be as independent as he imagines himself, free of all ties: "One's every act toward another—help included—brings obligations and creates fate. One is caught in the net." Love and hate are two sides of the same coin; Jensen reflects that "of course destruction dwells in us all. In each there lives a murderer. But there also dwells a saviour and rescuer in us." The surprising and uplifting ending of the book brings out the best in each of the characters, and leaves the reader with a sense of hope for the uncertain future.
Sensitively rendered into English by translator Esther Greenleaf Mürer, this book represents a significant contribution to world literature, as well as being "a good read."
Review by Hans Christian Andersen, University of
Northumbria
In The Sharks, the author has used a well-known and popular literary genre,
adventure on the high seas, to create an allegory about the nature of human society. He
is, of course, not the first person to do so. The Sharks resounds with echoes of
literary history, from Melville to Monsarrat, and naval myth, ideological argumentation
and historical documentation intermingle with more conventional narrative and
dialogue.
The Sharks tells the story of daily life on three-masted bark Neptune,
sailing from Manila to Marseilles with a cargo of hemp, in the last year of the nineteenth
century. Bjørneboe uses the genre to good effect. Through the story, he shows
mankind under laboratory conditions as it were, revealing the tensions that arise when
people (mainly men) of many different nationalities and backgrounds are thrown
together in their sea-borne microcosm, forced to work together in a fixed hierarchy of
officers and sailors, subject to the social tensions that inevitably arise but also forced to
contend with a common enemy: nature, the sea.
But this is not a story about a battle between man and nature so much as a battle
between mankind and its own nature. The main character and the novel's narrator is the
Norwegian ship's officer Peder Jensen, Second Mate and the ship's "doctor."
Jensen is therefore ideally suited to tell the novel's story. Like the confidant in a
nineteenth-century well-made play, he has access to everybody on the ship and enjoys a
privileged insight into everybody's lives. He presents himself as a simple man and a
reluctant story-teller, but in fact he is highly articulate and his analysis of events on the
ship is so learned and thoughtful that it often threatens the realism of the story.
But then this is no ordinary ship and its crew are on no ordinary mission. The
white-painted Neptune, a powerful symbol of man's attempt to master nature
and rally mankind into a fixed social system, is racing towards the edge of the world as
we know it at the end of the nineteenth century. The narrator has deliberately detached
himself from close personal relationships and deliberately refused to take command of
ships himself. As a human being, he has isolated himself from his fellow human beings,
becoming an impossibly neutral observer of events. For him, the Neptune's
last voyage becomes a voyage through the philosophical foundation of modern society.
That analysis reveals a change in the power relationships between North and South,
between the old imperialist powers (who command the ship) and the increasingly restless
third world (who crew it).
But that the same time—and this is at least as important to the author—the
novel develops an existential view of mankind which has its roots in the narrator's
instinctive fear and anxiety. At the level of realism, his fear turns out to be
well-founded: the crew eventually mutiny. Add to that the perhaps much deeper fear of
the ocean itself, embodied in the narrative by the diabolic hammerhead shark and the
two drowned sailors whom the ship encounters: life at sea is inextricably linked with the
constant threat of death, life implies its own negation, evil seems to prevail everywhere,
the sharks share the ocean with man.
Out of this, Bjørneboe develops a tentatively positive vision: the world may not be
perfect, good may not seem to conquer evil, but then this is the only world we have and
it is more important to cope with evil than to conquer it: evil after all is not invincible.
Indeed, the novel proposes that we need to be equally careful to learn how to cope with
goodness, as the narrator learns as a father-son relationship develops between himself
and a helpless and useless deck boy. Peder Jensen is reluctant to accept this
relationship, but he finds that he can no more keep the demands of goodness at bay than
he can those of evil.
Jensen fits into a long line of Scandinavian literary characters, who observe the human
condition rather than actively trying to change it, but his insight is greater than many of
his forebears: he is constantly aware of what is happening around him, at the same time
as he is swept along on an allegorical wave of events. For the readers, it is the
"inconclusive" and undogmatic nature of the narrative that is the most
interesting. It will keep them guessing about the outcome of the novel, which one can
best describe as being chillingly optimistic about man's ability to live in peace: armed and
ready to fight the surrounding savages in order to preserve peace. Some have seen this
as a hopeful ending, but it can surely also be seen as the direct opposite.
This is an action novel and an allegory, and as such it is a type of novel which the
post-modernist reader has come to know very well since the original publication of
The Sharks in 1974. The large amount of comment and interpretation within
the story frequently does remove it from the realm of pure fiction to that of social,
political and philosophical exegesis. Even if one accepts the death of literary genre and
the invalidity of literary purity, it gives the novel (rather than just the main character or
the central theme) a feeling of indeterminacy which makes Bjørneboe's
achievement with the novel seem equally uncertain.
The translation reads well and only in a few, rare instances does the Norwegian of the
original seem to spill over into the English text in an unintentional way.
Durham University Journal, vol. 85, no. 2 (July 1993)