Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga

Turtles all the way down.

This is a story of the dangers of artificial intelligence — not hallucinations or academic dishonesty or the singularity, but rather the tale of what happens when you let a large language model choose the next book for your book club.

To back up a bit: I get to nominate three books for my book club every seven to eight months or so, then all the members (including me) vote on which one they want to read. When I’ve spent more time reading reviews of books than the books, picking three tends to be an easy process. When I’ve exhausted my queue of books, as happened this month, I have to do some digging, and in this case, who better to do the digging for me than everyone’s favorite personal assistant?

I began by giving Perplexity a list of some of my favorite books¹ and told it to generate a list of ten more novels that I might enjoy. It did a good job, perhaps too good a job, as I had already read all ten novels on the list. This called for the human touch, so I asked it to find ten obscure novels instead. From there I did a quick cross-reference on Goodreads² and a check to see which were available in my local library system.

Save for my dissenting vote, my book club picked Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen, a novel that follows the doomed crew of a Caribbean turtling boat. I’m not sure they were entirely happy with their decision, but I enjoyed the book a great deal.

Far Tortuga is an experimental novel, told in staccato bursts of dialogue and gorgeous descriptions of the natural world. At times it feels like a novel-length poem, at other times like a play, complete with stage directions. Its opening pages contain neither human characters nor any sort of rising action other than the breaking of a new day:

Daybreak.

At Windward Passsage, four hundred miles due east, the sun is rising. Wind east-northeast, thirty-eight knots, with gusts to forty-five: a gale.

Black waves, wind-feathered. White birds, dark birds.

The trade winds freshen at first light, and the sea rises in long ridges, rolling west.

Sunrise at longitude 76, 19 degrees north latitude.

These opening moments give some clues as to what this novel is concerned with: the wind, the sea, locations on the map. Then the characters take the stage, Byrum approaching the docks with a bag of mangoes in hand, Vemon drunk at the bottom of a catboat, Wodie hidden away below decks to avoid a murder charge. They banter and argue and talk about the great captains of the past and it’s a testament to Matthiessen’s gifts as a storyteller that we get to know them despite how infrequently we know who is talking at any given moment.

Here’s a pretty typical piece of dialogue:

Athens tellin you de God’s truth, Speedy. One time he maroon four rangers on de cays … who? Dis coptin here dat’s always shoutin about justice! Oh, mon! Dat was what de old people likes to call a real conflaption! Sailed home to Cayman leavin four of dem fellas behind on de cays with insufficient water, and den he told dere families dat dey were doin very very fine, and after dat he forgot about’m. Dis were nothin but hoggishness; prob’ly he smugglin, or runnin guns down to Colombia. He decide he got business at home, so he go home, not takin time to pick dem up. Mon, dey were just lucky dat another vessel come along. But one fella from Old Bush dere, he run out of water, and den he got scared, thinkin de ship were mashed up and were never goin to come, and so he row all the way to some Wika village on de Sponnish coast. He row forty, fifty mile, and he arrive dere in very bad shape; he domn lucky he alive.

He all right again now, dey say. Put him away in de asylum, y’know—wavin his arms, givin orders at de crossins, all of dat. De distress of dat experience done it to him. But now he able to hondle himself again, and he come home.³

The dialogue in Matthiessen’s novel can feel artless, but each speech and conversation is doing multiple pieces of work to propel the story forward. The example above is developing the world and defining the relationships between the characters⁴ and foreshadowing future events and reinforcing the novel’s themes. The reader knows early on that the voyage is probably doomed, as the Lillias Eden lacks life jackets, an idea mirrored in the abandonment of the men on the cays. It’s similarly clear that Captain Raib’s leadership style is dangerous, a combustible mix of pride and anger and unpredictable laughter at the expense of his crew.

And about his crew — almost every one of them could have come from the asylum of Athens’ story, with Byrum, the first character we meet, overbrimming with confidence, the bull goose loony of the joint. Far Tortuga asks Byrum and every other member of the crew the same question: how far they trust Raib with their lives. At what point will their understanding that the voyage is doomed overcome their willingness to follow the natural hierarchy of men at sea? This too is contained in the passage above, exemplified by the man who finally loses faith in orders and duty and rows for home. His story suggests that while you might have to be a little crazy to take on such a mission, the world can always make you a little crazier.

Matthiessen is concerned with how people behave in these situations, when stretched beyond what they can rightly endure: stretched by nature⁵ or by circumstance or by the context in which they find themselves. The action of the novel takes place in 1964 and the times are a-changing, the turtling days are coming to an end, to be replaced by Yankee tourism. The fathers (Raib and his first mate, Will Parchment) are disappointed in their sons; their sons revere or revile their fathers, there is no middle ground. To complicate matters further, Raib’s father, the catatonic Captain Andrew Avers, makes an appearance as a kind of ghost of Christmas past. Given this context, it’s not particularly surprising that Raib is driven farther and farther afield in his search for green sea turtles, even as his crew dwindles and his judgment wanes.

Far Tortuga comes from the same branch of the literary family tree as Lord of the Flies, and its ultimate destination is also a confrontation with evil and death. Golding’s novel gives us a mass of flies on pig’s head, but in Far Tortuga death is on the water as well:

All dis time dat stranger never moved, and dat boat never drifted, no mon, not one foot, in de current and de wind. It were like de sun had stopped in its time of risin, and every living thing had to stop and wait. De world was waitin. Den dat dead leaf jump free again, blowed down across the road, and I got my breath, and I turned my back on them yeller eyes and I went down to the seashore. Oh, yes. I knew. I had felt de sign. I were right dere when he brought the body in. And you know something? I know every catboat on dat coast, and I never seen dat blue boat before. I never seen dat fella neither, never in my life. I never thought to ask his name, not den, and I never seen him after.

This turn to the uncanny means that Far Tortuga is no longer just a story about some men dying at sea, it’s now about the very nature of death itself, death as a character, death as the other side of a coin whose obverse face depicts a very masculine sense of courage and adventure and grasping onto tradition.

Creation myths from a variety of cultures imagine that the world is supported on the back of an enormous turtle; certainly the world in which Far Tortuga takes place rests on the backs of green sea turtles, hawksbills, and loggerheads. I remember watching nature videos as a child in which baby sea turtles rush from their hatching grounds on the sand to the water, where they will have to face other predators, including the men of Matthiessen’s novel. There’s a sympathy in Far Tortuga for their plight: the final words spoken by man are to a turtle before the dialogue of the novel dissolves back into descriptions of the vivid beauty of nature.

It’s a remarkable novel, one that is likely to either annoy the reader or stick with them for a long time. I fall well into the latter category.

1. Infinite Jest, 2666, Beloved, Wolf Hall, etc.

2. In part to make sure that the novels were real, not hallucinations; in part to double-check that they were the kind of books I would actually want to read.

3. I don’t want to spend a lot of time thinking about the use of dialect, other than to say there has obviously been a dramatic change in we think about novels written in a dialect that’s not part of the author’s own culture or experience. Twenty years ago I would have likely been impressed by Matthiessen’s skill; today I find myself wondering whether Matthiessen had the right to appropriate these voices. But in terms of thinking about the novel, it’s a bit of a dead end, as there’s no way for the story to work as Matthiessen imagined it without being written in dialect.

4. For example, after bad-mouthing the captain in this way, Athens agrees that he doesn’t have to be subservient because he could beat the captain up.

5. This is a real “nature bats last” sort of novel, that’s for sure.