"Huge and vital, aircraft carriers remain mysterious and unthought-of"
Boats, in literature, have tended to be disaster-zones. Infectious disease, mutiny, shipwreck; a locked-room drama on the high seas. They don't fare much better in the movies. Robert Redford struggled to elude disaster recently in All Is Lost, his little brig colliding with an errant shipping container that might have fallen from Tom Hanks's vessel, the Maersk Alabama, hijacked by Somali pirates in another recent hit, Captain Phillips. Hanks's film presented a modern version of the solitary sailor: isolated on an industrial scale. Container ships like the Maersk Alabama are the distant facilitators of our everyday life, a kind of “logistical unconscious” for the developed world. A single one can carry enough bananas for everyone in Europe, yet this rarely crosses our minds when chopping one up over Weetabix.
Military aircraft-carriers might be altogether less benign but they represent a similar blend of enormousness and invisibility. Huge and vital, they remain mysterious and unthought-of. The USS George HW Bush is a good example: one of ten active carriers in the US fleet, it cost over $6n to build, weighs 100,000 tonnes, and it's out there, somewhere. For two weeks in 2011 it played host to the writer Geoff Dyer, dispatched to the Arabian Gulf by Alain de Botton's new “Writers in Residence” scheme. The result is Another Great Day at Sea, an account of his stay, festooned with pictures by the Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins.
One goal of “Writers in Residence” is to illuminate the unseen spaces of modern life. Yet if the stupendous grey hulk of the George HW Bush might seem an exemplar of modernity's impersonal “non-places” (to borrow a term from the French sociologist Marc Augé), then our first realisation is that it is, in fact, the reverse: an enormous floating city, a “giant workplace” where staff rarely clock less than 14 hours a day. Dyer, self-styled “marine anthropologist,” is awed by this “vision of a fulfilled and industrious America, each person indispensable to the workings of the larger enterprise, no friction between the person and the task.”
A writer—any writer—is bound to feel out of place here. Nodding with awkward sagacity at his subjects, Dyer feels like a visiting royal, “constantly saying ‘Sorry’ and ‘Excuse me’ and generally gangling about the place.” At 53, he's among the oldest on-board, older than the high-ranking officers; at 6’3”, he's also the second tallest. Much of his time is spent stooping through endlessly long corridors and cramped doorways. He complains often about the lack of comforts: he is a fussy eater, he insists on having his own room when almost all the sailors share bunk-beds (or “racks”) three storeys high, he gets annoyed when he can't check his email. He sounds less like Bruce Chatwin or Ernest Hemingway than a “sensibility on tour” in the manner of Flaubert (also a tall man).
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This ineptitude is, of course, part of a carefully constructed persona, familiar to readers of his other work, where Dyer-the-writer and Dyer-the-character merge into a single entity. 1997's Out of Sheer Rage—ostensibly a study of DH Lawrence—was perhaps the finest example of this stylised-self in action. And just as his exaggerated frailties were part of that story, so in Another Great Day at Sea they set the stage for Dyer's exploration of this unfamiliar world.
The book's title echoes Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of the Ugandan civil war, 1976's Another Day of Life. Dyer's work, though eloquent and insightful, necessarily lacks the historical immediacy of Kapuscinki's book, largely because there isn't a war on. In fact, his title alludes to precisely this looming sensation that a warship in peacetime is forever threatening to become a contradiction in terms. It's lifted from the Captain's daily, spirit-rousing announcements over the ship's intercom system:
“…the Captain always told everyone what a great day it was. Despite this, he always managed to re-italicize or re-emphasize the ‘great’, as though yesterday had not been quite as great, and today, while in many ways indistinguishable from the interminable days that had gone before, was somehow better or greater, thereby raising the possibility that tomorrow might be even greater.”
Dyer decides that “There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.” He's keen on this Americanism, too. His destination “had to be American,” not merely because the British Navy no longer has any aircraft-carriers, but also “to escape the audible symptoms of the top-to-bottom, toff-to-prole hierarchy that is so clearly manifest in the British military.” (There's a trace here of that “lambasting of England and Englishness,” that Dyer has elsewhere called “a sure sign of Englishness.”) Later, during a huge “steaks for troops” party on deck, he meets a man named “Clinton Stonewall III, from Birmingham, Alabama.” “Was it possible,” asks Dyer, “to cram more history into a name and a one-line answer?”
This floating Americana also recalls Dyer's celebrated study of photography, The Ongoing Moment, which explored the work of Walker Evans, Diane Arbus and others. Doing away with linear chronology and structured instead around recurrent photographic motifs—barber shops, gas stations, the endless freeway—that book conjured the hypnotic atmospherics of the cross-continental road trip, a disorientating dream-time also found in his second novel The Search, and in the “zone” of Andrei Tarkovky's film Stalker (subject of Dyer's previous book, Zona).On the boat, such a sensation doesn't have to be cultivated so much as warded off: it's the same sense of inertia implicit in the Captain's broadcasts. Watching the sun rise and set every day out on the “fantail,” Dyer's favourite spot, “it was easy to fall into a cognitive trance,” such reverie easily precipitating “a kind of mental seasickness whereby the clarity and fixity of the carrier's unquestioned purpose gave rise to feelings—and questions—of purposelessness.”
Here is the inherent problem of the literary and cinematic boat: when it isn't a crisis, it's an interlude. This presents a challenge for the peacetime writer, as Dyer himself is aware. It doesn't help that his ideas of hanging around the on-board bars, “getting stories from loose-tongued sailors like an old-fashioned Fleet Street hack” were a misapprehension: the ship is an alcohol-free zone, and the “cognitive trance” of the fantail is the only stupor one can fall into (legally, at least). But dramatising the writer's job of chiselling out a narrative is a regular feature of Dyer's work. In this instance, it's played out through the rapport that he establishes with the ship's cast of characters, giving shape to his sojourn and generating a winning spirit of conviviality along the way. Tanned, toned and ammo-belted, they're like “the fulfilment of some kind of fantasy—not a sexual one, more like a fantasy of evolution itself.” Chaperoned by the erstwhile Ensign Paul Newell, Dyer gradually discerns “A sense of purpose and order—even, I am tempted to say—of narrative, … emerging, unbidden, from my time on the carrier.”
One peculiarity of this book is how little Dyer has to say on the accompanying photographs by Steele-Perkins, beyond offhand references to “the snapper.” We might have expected a closer engagement, especially given his enduring interest in photography and photographic analogy—from his first novel The Colour of Memory, “an album of snaps,” onwards. The nearest thing in Another Great Day at Sea is a description of himself as “a tourist” accumulating “a collection of camera-less holiday snaps.” When his verbal snapshots are combined with Steele Perkins's pictures, the result is terrific. Capturing the colossal scale of their subject in human terms, the carrier is revealed as a space brimming with interest and life, battleship-grey from the outside, but full of colour within.
