There have been no contracts signed for books on the Swiss canyoning disaster–yet. But “the trend has definitely taken over the limited imagination of publishing executives,” notes Starling Lawrence, the Norton editor who bought “The Perfect Storm.” Most of what’s coming out now leans heavily on the disaster part of the adventure-disaster equation. Currently no fewer than three publishers are hustling out books about the discovery this spring of climber George Mallory’s body on Everest. Agent Michael Carlisle, who just last week sold another book on the shipwrecked Shackleton expedition to the South Pole in 1914, admits there is something like a feeding frenzy among publishers for these stories. “If it’s not ambulance chasing,” he says, “it’s certainly capitalizing on tragedy.”
Publishers are delighted by this trend, with subjects as varied as deep-sea treasure hunting and Antarctic expeditions turning into best sellers. But they all hedge when you ask them who the audience is. “It’s the baby boomers, sure, that’s the core audience,” says John Barstow, an editor at Norton who is overseeing a joint publishing venture with Outside magazine called Outside Books. More specifically, he targets technophobes keen on discovering “elemental stories that return man to nature’s mercy.” But no one has hard figures on how many readers actually strap on a backpack. Most publishers assume their readers are just armchair adventurers.
One thing publishers do know for sure: it’s a sellers’ market. In 1996 Norton paid a mere $30,000 for “The Perfect Storm.” This year Viking paid $1.2 million for Nathaniel Philbrick’s account of the 1820 shipwreck of the Essex, which was sunk by a whale. That tale inspired “Moby-Dick.” Now it just reminds us that writers like Melville were concerned with the metaphysics of men in dire straits. Modern scribes are more interested in the wow factor of six-story waves demolishing helpless yachts.
If there are no Melvilles among the current crop of writers, there are a handful of thoughtful observers. Derek Lundy’s “Godforsaken Sea” (Algonquin), the story of sailors who singlehandedly race around the globe, tells you exactly what it feels like to sail the treacherous latitudes nearing Antarctica: “The boat was pitchpoled end over end and rolled 360 degrees simultaneously… Virtually everything that wasn’t bolted down had been sucked out of the fifty-square-foot hole in the deck by the force of the wave.” And in “The Hungry Ocean” (Hyperion), skipper turned author Linda Greenlaw supplies an exciting account of the daily life of a commercial fisherman, including emergency dental work: “Three crew members and I watched with interest as a fourth man extracted his own tooth with a pair of needle-nosed pliers.”
But even the best of these books are haunted by the staleness that comes when publishers cash in on the success of singularly great books like “Into Thin Air.” Greenlaw admits that she would never have gotten a book contract if she had not first appeared as a character in Junger’s “The Perfect Storm.” More profoundly, disaster-adventure books too often market suffering in the name of entertainment. It’s hard to call books such as the Sydney-to-Hobart yacht-race sagas or any of the Everest books merely great reads after real people start dropping dead. This explains why Junger, for one, insists that his book is not an adventure yarn. “People who knew those guys on that boat that sank would never think of it as an adventure,” he says. “Adventure is hardship by choice.” A worthy distinction. But maybe beside the point, given how many of the heroes of these books willfully stepped in harm’s way.
“This type of book will always be a staple on the best-seller lists,” says Will Schwalbe, Greenlaw’s editor at Hyperion. “It goes back to the caveman who came back to the cave and regaled everyone about the battle with the bear.” The stories don’t change. Neither does our need to hear them. Evolution just comes down to a search for a better armchair and a good reading light.
