The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

Farley Mowat

I have not previously mentioned that Itchy lacked toilet facilities. The truth is that I had never thought about installing them because, until Claire's coming, they would have been redundant. The bob chains forward, and the bumpkin aft, provided adequate comfort in an open environment. For men.
Having boarded the ship, I went below to light the lamps, leaving Claire the privacy of the dark adn slippery decks. Soon I heard a mammoth splash and rushed on deck with a flashlight to find her small, white face bobbing in the black, oily waters alongside. She was not alone. A few feet away my flashlight beam picked up the grinning gape of a cat that had died hard, and died a long, long time ago. Fortunately, Claire had sense enough to keep her mouth shut. Had she swallowed any of the water of the inner harbor it is possible my story would have ended on a tragic note.
Rescuing her was something of a task because, as she pointed out when she was finally dragged , dripping and furious onto the deck, Nobody can swim with their slacks down around their ankles! In truth, she must have found it a harrowing experience, but when she had been taken up to Paulo's, hot-bathed, fortified with brandy, and given clean clothes, her good nature reasserted itself. In fact, I was so pleased with her that I redesigned the forepeak of the schooner so that there would be a room for a small convenience, Ladies, for the use of.

I did not look back. When a man has made a really monumental asp of himself, he should never, never look back.

Mowat has a wonderful wit, and writes humor with a flair that avoids triviality (mostly). Every time the boat seems to need a miracle for it to float any more, Mowat denies you the cute miracle, everything's alright miracle but also manages to avoid ending the story. Instead he presents a tribute to how much a foolish human can take and how much fun it is to laugh at man getting ground under the heel of the elements--this post's date notes its proximity to the earthquake in Haiti of 1.12.2010--we like to laugh at how little nature makes us feel, when we aren't crying. Although man's sometimes unfair struggle against nature figures as a prominent source of humor in Mowat's The Boat Who Wouldn't Float, I don't think someone reading it in the aftermath of such an event as Haiti's quake would feel it tasteless.

But in the spirit of unfairness that lands a 7.0 magnitude earthquake under one of the poorest nations on earth, I'll change the subject, and talk about something else I want to talk about.

Mowat's treatment of women in The Boat Who Wouldn't Float is rather odd. I haven't read any of his other work, so I don't know if it is peculiar to this novel or not, but I find him at curious odds with himself when it comes to women. It should be said first though, that The Boat Who Wouldn't Float is not a novel of women. What few women characters there are tend to be pretty flat (only on the page of course, in other ways otherwise). He introduces the main female character, Clair a little more than halfway through. Clair is rarely quoted by the narrator as most other (male) characters are, and because of her seeming silence she looms in the back of the narrative like some overbearing specter. I'm no feminist, but I couldn't help feeling that Mowat did Clair a great disservice. What kind of character doesn't exist so prominently? Sometimes you wonder if Mowat has forgotten poor Clair, but then she resurfaces again and stuns you with the revelation that she's been there all along. How is this possible? How can so much happen, so many pages be filled, and this character be with us through it all, but unknown to us? The reader feels betrayed. Especially since Clair, when she does appear, appears to be such a real winner.

Mowat's Clair might be the perfect woman, if Mowat could have made her something more than a cardboard cutout that he looks at every once in a while. As the above quote will convey, she takes the worst of scenarios and only needs a bit of the stiff stuff to be her cheery self again. Every time Mowat comes to a particularly dangerous crossing in his suicidal and depressed little boat, he promptly puts Clair ashore at the nearest port so that she can meet him on the other side. She never seems to say anything about this. I can see that she is a less experienced sailor than Mowat and that she probably had no desire to go drown herself, but the strange silence in which all this occurs feels weird.

By this point you may wonder what I'm driving at. Is it a case of too good to be true? Does Mowat try to paint the picture of a woman who'll have adventures with him and live the rough life with him and let him be a knight in shining armor when he wants and does he simply fail to pull it off because it's so much like what he dreams of? I don't think so. It seemed to me more that Mowat didn't notice that he wasn't actually creating a character, but was creating a pin-up poster of a girl who he could roll up and store in a waterproof tube when Itchy's cabin was especially leaky. Most likely, Mowat suffered as most writers with an inability to write the other sex. But something more is missing: the romance Mowat paints in the last fifty pages of the book, isn't a romance at all, it's a fantasy--the difference being that a fantasy is only ever about one person.

Think about this if you are having dreams of flying down to Haiti to help out.