By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Arvid Wadhera’s novel Choppiness on High Seas tells the complex story of a man's life, from an impoverished childhood, to financial success, to a long marriage, business and personal relationships, parenthood, grandparenthood, and above all the various losses in his life as he comes to terms with the deaths of others. It’s an interesting trajectory even if the protagonist is not always the most interesting aspect of the book.
Matthew Stephens was born in poverty to Gail, a single mother and housekeeper to a wealthy family. He was raised during WWII where he became an evacuee and Gail cleaned hospitals.
The poverty, war years, and separation gave the mother and son an unbreakable bond that lasts long after death. When Matthew is in a moral or emotional crossroads, he imagines Gail’s ghost giving him common sense advice and sometimes chastising him as though he were still a small child.
This difficult upbringing taught Matthew much about resilience and loyalty. These traits carry him through the struggles that he experiences later in life.
This resilience implements itself into his rise in status as he takes an apprenticeship for a shipping company. He then ascends to the point that he eventually becomes not only a shipping magnate, but the wealthiest man in Britain.
His perseverance is found in his work style of “just getting on with it.” He does his work, does extra, collects his earnings, cultivates friendships, gets promoted. He faces his career trajectory with stoicism, calm under pressure, a strong sense for business, and a practical rational mind.
As a teen, Matthew’s loyalty is manifested as he and his mother fight off a violent rapist and he takes care of her during the aftermath while Gail’s health takes a serious turn.
The loyalty also occurs during his marriage to Gwendolyn and the birth of his daughter, Sally. He clearly loves his wife and is very restrained with his emotions towards her. She is the more emotional type and able to bring out a tender more romantic side in him.
Matthew's fidelity is so great that when there is a moment where he meets an attractive brilliant client, Kung Ling, the Reader anticipates an extramarital affair but is pleasantly relieved to find that is not the case. He merges with her in business and nothing else. Gwendolyn is the real love of his life and this incident proves it.
It’s not the most interesting subplot because of the resolution but it does show that Matthew has standards and loves his wife. It also is a credit to Kung Ling that Matthew is able to look beyond her attractiveness and see an intelligent and worthy business partner.
Matthew and Gwendolyn’s union is tested when Gwendolyn faces a health crisis and Matthew remains by her side. There are plenty of moments where one is at their most vulnerable and in tears with the other providing a steady comfort.
Matthew is also supportive of Sally’s decisions. She forgoes her privileged wealthy upbringing to become a nurse in a lower income area. Even though he worked hard to provide Sally with a lifestyle different from the one in which he grew up, he understands her need to make her own way in the world.
Matthew also respects Sally's decision during an unexpected pregnancy to raise the child herself as a single mother. No doubt, Matthew is reminded of his own feisty mum and sees a lot of Gail in her granddaughter. At least Sally won't be completely alone and will have a grandmum and granddad to help her look after the little one.
Traits such as resilience, stoicism, loyalty make Matthew a great guy, but they don’t make him the most compelling protagonist. This is a novel where a lot of dramatic things happen that we don’t see through the eyes of those who go through them. Instead it is told through Matthew’s limited third person.
Some of the experiences like Gwen’s illness affect him but it's all viewed with detachment from someone who just gets on with it and is outside of direct impact with the story. The other characters are the ones who get sick, get arrested, are abandoned by lovers, go bankrupt, or are faced with their immortality. At times, he comes across as a vanilla protagonist chronicling other people’s stories and how they affect him but not how they personally experience them.
It would be more compelling to experience those things through the characters that are directly involved and not just Matthew. It would be interesting to get Gail’s backstory or experience Gwendolyn's illness from her perspective. Perhaps Sally’s work as a nurse could be much more fleshed out. We could find out about Kung Ling’s life as a woman in a man's world of big business.
Perhaps Wadhera wanted to create the book as a one-person narrative instead of an ensemble. Perhaps Matthew was the one he felt emotionally close to or was his Author Avatar. Matthew's perspective is fine particularly during a subplot when he has to weigh his loyalty to a friend who is charged with child molestation and whether his resilience is a defense mechanism for facing tough times or a coward’s means of avoiding them.
However, there are long stretches where the important life or death struggles are right outside our peripheral view. We need a more interesting narrator to experience them himself or the opportunity for other characters tell their own stories.
