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{{a|book review| | {{a|book review|{{image|Teignmouth Electron|jpg|The ''Teignmouth Electron'' now abandoned on [[Cayman]] Brac}}}}{{br|The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst}} — {{author|Nicholas Tomalin}} | ||
{{Quote|“{{old systems break quote}}” | |||
:—{{author|Stewart Brand}}, {{br|The Maintenance Race}}}} | |||
==Alone, alone, all all alone, alone on a wide wide sea== | ==Alone, alone, all all alone, alone on a wide wide sea== | ||
This is a wonderful book about a truly remarkable, moving and literally tragic misadventure. I first stumbled across Donald Crowhurst’s story through a terrific Channel 4 feature film, ''Deep Water'', and was so captivated by it that I bought this and another account of the race (fellow competitor Bernard | This is a wonderful book about a truly remarkable, moving and literally tragic misadventure. I first stumbled across Donald Crowhurst’s story through a terrific Channel 4 feature film, ''Deep Water'', and was so captivated by it that I bought this and another account of the race (fellow competitor {{author|Bernard Moitessier}}’s ''The Long Way'' which, for the record, doesn’t really touch on the Crowhurst story). | ||
The Bard himself could not have scripted a tragedy better than this. Crowhurst, a mercurial but fundamentally unremarkable director of a struggling electronics business, hits upon a means of saving his business and assuring his family’s future: entering (and winning) the 1968 Sunday Times single-handed round-the-world yacht race. | The Bard himself could not have scripted a tragedy better than this. Crowhurst, a mercurial but fundamentally unremarkable director of a struggling electronics business, hits upon a means of saving his business and assuring his family’s future: entering (and winning) the 1968 Sunday Times single-handed round-the-world yacht race. | ||
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Tomalin and Hall’s book, which came out within a year of the original event, is an expertly pieced-together and beautifully written forensic study of the whole awful saga, and charts sympathetically and extensively Crowhurst’s descent into what they assume (plausibly enough to me) to have been a form of paranoid schizophrenia by the end of his life. The relation of Crowhurst’s final plunge into the abyss, and his final burst of energy in recording his cosmic revelation is by turns dreadful and somehow uplifting: here is a hero going out in true [[Nietzsche|Nietzschean]] style with the psychology of the tragic poet: | Tomalin and Hall’s book, which came out within a year of the original event, is an expertly pieced-together and beautifully written forensic study of the whole awful saga, and charts sympathetically and extensively Crowhurst’s descent into what they assume (plausibly enough to me) to have been a form of paranoid schizophrenia by the end of his life. The relation of Crowhurst’s final plunge into the abyss, and his final burst of energy in recording his cosmic revelation is by turns dreadful and somehow uplifting: here is a hero going out in true [[Nietzsche|Nietzschean]] style with the psychology of the tragic poet: | ||
{{quote|“''Not so as to get rid of pity and terror ... but beyond pity and terror, to realise in oneself the eternal joy of becoming — that joy which also encompasses the joy in destruction''”}} | |||
{{sa}} | |||
*{{br|The Long Way}} | |||
{{ref}} | |||