Captains Courageous

The obnoxious son of a millionaire falls off a luxury liner, is rescued by a fishing schooner, spends the summer as a crew member, and after a manly diet of toil, chowder and chastisement returns to inherit the family wealth as a more deserving character. Kipling's tale of the nineteenth-century Atlantic fisheries, accompanied in this edition by a scholarly introduction and entertainingly pedantic notes, should read as coldly as a manuscript chiselled out of an iceberg. And in many ways - with its dense nautical terminology, its attempts at faithful transcriptions of several dialects, its Tarantinoid insouciance over the use of the word 'nigger', and its apparent assumptions about wealth and status - it is indeed a troublesome yarn. However, in the hands of such a powerful storyteller, the theme of redemption through ordeal remains a seductive one. At the very least, this is an interesting cadaver to serve up at the dissecting table, but don't be too surprised if it sits up and embraces you.