How to drown without falling overboard
BELOW DECK by Sophie Hardcastle (Allen & Unwin, $33)
For 21-year-old Olivia, all experiences have a colour. A song on the radio is bright pink; a surprised shout is a vivid green, but her life? A dull grey.
Estranged from her parents, Oli has only her grieving grandfather and egotistical boyfriend to rely on as she graduates university and enters the real world. With an enviable internship on the horizon, it seems her future is set, until she wakes up on a strange boat without any memory of how she got there and with two strangers who will change her life forever.
Enamoured by the kind-hearted seaman Mac and his friend Maggie, Oli abandons her predictable plans and joins them as they sail the coast of Australia. Four years later, on a different boat, sailing across the same ocean, Oli’s life is transformed yet again but in a way that colours her life in shades of suffocating black.
Years at sea made her tough, so when she had the chance to join a crew of men delivering a yacht from Noumea to Auckland, she thought little of it. But one night, below deck, she learns there are ways to drown without ever falling overboard. Wrought with unanswerable questions and unbearable emotions, she runs to London but in the land-locked city, she’s still haunted.
The highly anticipated novel is something of a debut for Sophie Hardcastle, a research assistant at Oxford University and author of two criticallyacclaimed YA books. Of her first adult novel, she says it explores the “ill-treatment of women at the hands of men”.
However, the prose couldn’t be further from the clinical, well-reasoned voice of a researcher. Richly descriptive yet easy to read, Below Deck’s poetic style is one that reaches out and pulls you in from page one.
Unafraid and armed with lyrical turns of phrase, Hardcastle doesn’t tackle the murky lines between consent and abuse, memory and reality, so much as sit alongside them, and encourage the reader to do the same. The result is a novel humming with tension between beautiful prose and uncomfortable questions.
What does it mean to want something and does that automatically connote consent? Whose voices are worthy of being heard and who dictates that worth in the first place? While Hardcastle describes it as a “cry out into the dark for women everywhere”, this novel is one all people should have on their 2020 bookshelf.