ACTS OF MUTINY

True love and a terror in the hold are the entwined themes of Beaven’s US debut, set in the twilight years of the British Empire, as an ocean liner en route to Australia carries a cargo destined to upset the social order in more ways than one. In 1959, Ralph was a boy at sea with his mother—and with the charming American seaman they had both deserted his father for in order to start as a new family far from London. From forty years later, Ralph struggles to remember that voyage, hampered by the fact that all trace of the ship’s existence seems to have vanished in the interim. As he recalls the deception involved in leaving his father, the terrible storm that drove the ship off course in the Atlantic, the children of other first-class passengers who shunned him for his strange clothes and his lesser-class origins (as well as his improper circumstances), and his eerie discovery of something monstrous below, other lives are invoked as well. For Ralph’s mystery liner also had Penny and Robert on board, she traveling to Australia alone to join her husband, with their children in boarding school to follow later, he going there as a satellite-tracking technician. From first sight they were mutually attracted, and by the time the ship passed through the Suez Canal and into the Indian Ocean they had embarked on a course that no amount of snubbery and moral indignation from their fellow passengers could alter. Theirs was a lusty, deliciously uninhibited affair, which both knew would change their lives once they reached journey’s end. But before they could cross the last stretch of open ocean, the monster Ralph glimpsed turned the promise of new beginnings into a cold war nightmare. Mystery and morality are cleverly and effectively combined, but the degree to which events are steeped in a stuffy British outlook, while no doubt realistic, makes for some ponderous reading on this side of the pond.