The North Line: catch of the day

The actual opening words of Matt Riordan’s novel, The North Line, are as ominous as any Herman Melville scene setter, warning the reader that we are in for a hell of a time.

Rough seas and wild adventures feature in The North Line by Matt Riordan.

“Call me Ishmael” are not the first words of this wonderful seafaring saga but the idiom and influence of Moby Dick are unmistakeable, centring as the book does on a person about to embark on an epic and frightening ­voyage.

The actual opening words of Matt Riordan’s novel, The North Line, are as ominous as any Herman Melville scene setter, warning the reader that we are in for a hell of a time:

“Adam was looking for a red-haired man. The fleet superintendent said that Nash had red hair, couldn’t be missed. He said Nash was different. He didn’t say from what.”

This reader had no problem with the precursive salty literary influences of Melville, flourishes of Jack London, the horror of Joseph Conrad, all leavened with the crisp simplicity of Hemingway.

The North Line by Matt Riordan

Raised on seafaring yarns and fishing adventures, I found Riordan’s blended style to be the recipe for the best literary seafood chowder I have tasted in years.

“Nash was lighting up. He spoke with the cigarette in his lips. ‘I’m not talking about sports fishing. That’s teasing animals for fun. I’m talking about seining, gillnetting, crabbing, long-lining – any way you catch fish for money. You done any of that?’.”

Of course he hasn’t. Adam is what the rough men on an Alaskan fishing boat call “totally green”.

He is a law student from Toledo who has lost his college scholarship over an incident involving drugs and now needs $26,000 to pay his way.

The toughest job in the world seems the best legal means of making that much money in one season. If he survives.

A crewman asks if Adam could just get a loan.

“Christ,” said the man, “I thought you went to college so you didn’t have to do this shit.”

Author Riordan is a lawyer who, like his character Adam, spent his early 20s on commercial fishing boats in Alaska, beyond the “North Line”, the 55th parallel north.

He lived what he writes, in a way no googling nor reading could ever inform. He captures the terrible savagery of the ocean feast as fishermen, sea lions and predatory birds share the Darwinian bounty.

“Everywhere he looked there was eating and f..king and dying in spectacular Technicolor violence. Men and machines and any living thing with teeth for it materialised out of creation to wade into the feast.”

Wonderfully, despite all tales of the cruel sea, Riordan exorcises the ghost of Herman Melville with a nice ironic touch. The men of the Bering Sea are fishing not for the whale but for a much smaller quarry, the sardine. But in billions just as heavy and, as we discover, just as deadly.

At college, reading outside his course requirements, Adam had discovered Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. At sea in the killing grounds he finds the laws of life are “brutal but incorruptible”.

He starts to understand and enjoy that elemental savagery and when the boats move on to catching thousands of tonnes of salmon he tries “to conjecture what it would be like to be one of the salmon at his feet, to struggle and survive, to beat the odds across the vast Pacific, only to follow some homing beacon to this unlikely doom”. In his deck mates Adam discovers a “new species”. He sees them as a vanishing type, essential to that kind of work, “but otherwise a threat to good order”.

He even wonders darkly, if after the “filthy human work is done” and the world made habitable and safe, that perhaps “you had to get rid of them”.

But the crew have no time for philosophy or the meaning of life while they are mending nets, and they tell him so.

“They’re f..king fish, and nobody knows why they do what they do. Why don’t they just stay out in the ocean where they are safe, where we aren’t slaughtering them by the billions every year? Just stitch up the holes. Don’t overthink this?”

By now, with the antecedence of Darwin and Melville, London, Conrad and Hemingway all caught up in Riordan’s vast seine-net, do I hear you overthinking and asking: “Where is Captain Ahab?”

And, yes, there is a suitably ugly and rapacious monomaniacal captain and fleet owner. His name is Kaid, and he is notorious for underpaying his crew.

Kaid tells Adam: “You’re so worried about money, money to pay for school, that you don’t see that you are getting an education right here. You are gonna get a lot more out of this trip than just the cash. Hell, you oughta be paying me.”

The North Line is Matt Riordan’s debut novel. The fly leaf of the book tells us he now lives in Australia. Although I prefer to catch my fish one at a time, and in fair weather, I hope this wonderfully absorbing book is not a one-off. From grim experience I know that the author would have enormous fun with the intrepid South Australian tuna fishermen and with the fearless deep-sea lobster fishers of Tasmania’s wild west coast.

Whichever.

Another serving of seafood for thought please, Mr Riordan.

Charles Wooley is fishing, probably.

About the author

Matt Riordan grew up in a small town in rural Michigan, on the shore of Lake Huron. He attended high school over the border in Canada, and then Tufts University in Massachusetts. Riordan spent much of his early 20s travelling and working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska before drifting through a variety of jobs, including a stint as a White House staffer. Eventually he landed in law school in Indiana. After graduating, Riordan was a litigator in New York for 20 years. He drafted much of The North Line, his first novel, while sitting in New York City courtrooms, waiting for his cases to be called. He now lives with his family in Australia.