TravelHow far does a travel writer have to go these days in search of visceral thrills for his readers? The world, after all, has been mapped, marvelled at and made fun of a million times over.
Jungles are now the preserve of dishevelled mobs of celebrities; Everest is filthier and more crowded than a London tube station at rush-hour; the Antarctic ice, melting at a rate of knots thanks to global warming, and colonised by swarms of UN boffins in white jumpsuits, isn't quite as outlandish as it used to be.
So this must have seemed like a brilliant idea for a travel book. Get a landlubber whose experience of the sea is limited to summer trips on sailing dinghies and occasional expeditions on the car ferry, and send him out into the open ocean on a trawler. Better yet, send him into the teeth of a north Atlantic gale in January.
You'll get page after dizzying page about mysterious unexplored depths inhabited by weird sea creatures. He can write about lumps - giant waves formed in wind conditions of force nine or higher, when a particularly energetic wave captures those immediately preceding it and slams into a boat with the force of a thermonuclear explosion. And the seasickness: great scope for purple prose there, surely? Thus Redmond O'Hanlon left his green and pleasant home in Oxfordshire and set off for Stromness to write a book about the sea; a subject about which, as Trawler gleefully - and repeatedly - proclaims, he doesn't "know his arse from his tit".
This, however, is the man who consulted the SAS before setting off to write a book on the Congo - and who, furthermore, actually went to the gym three times a week for two years, as recommended by the army's finest. He may be unable to keep his footing on the heaving deck, or keep his food in his heaving stomach, he may not even be able to tell the difference between deep-water trawls and old car tyres - but this, dear reader, is a man. And so old Redmond rolls up his sleeves and gets down to fish-gutting. By the end of the book he is well and truly a trawlerman - in fact, his happiest moment comes when the boat's skipper, Jason Schofield, dazed by the sleep deprivation that is par for every north Atlantic course, inadvertently puts him in charge of the boat.
Acceptance into one of the toughest boys' clubs on earth - it's a terrific achievement for O'Hanlon.
But where does all this machismo leave the hapless reader? Scuppered, is the answer. Trawler contains more exclamation marks per square inch than a teenage Internet chat room. It starts at manic, then ratchets up the hysteria level as relentlessly as a winch hauling another load of redfish and halibut out of the water.
Inexplicably, it is written almost totally in dialogue, of which a typical sample runs as follows: "Jesus! Stop moping. You're moping like a teenager! And look, Redmond, I've had enough of it - I thought you were tough, well, not physically obviously, look at you! But mentally, yes, mentally tough, at least . . . But hey! You're not! . . . So come on . . ."
The topic may vary, but the tone does not. For 300 pages. True, there's plenty of good stuff about fish and fishing; in fact, the apparently limitless knowledge of O'Hanlon's on-board guide, marine biologist Luke Bullough - a man whose head, one of his colleagues notes, is "stuffed with fish" - almost saves the day.
O'Hanlon fans will read this regardless, as will those interested by boats and matters nautical. For the rest of us, it's as disappointing as a plate of badly cooked fish: all bones and no flavour.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
Trawler By Redmond O'Hanlon Hamish Hamilton, 338pp. £20
