If there’s something appealing about the notion of being stranded, it no doubt tends to come at a distance – when one is separated from the reality of being left high and dry, safely protected from the reality of the experience by words on a page or images on a screen. Shipwrecked on an island. Stuck on a mountain. Trapped in a vehicle. Lost in the wilderness and perhaps even driven to cannibalism. These are extraordinary instances of being stranded. Most of us won’t live them, though some unfortunate people do. I suspect those people would say the charm of the thought, having to struggle with just our wits and what we find nearby to survive, depreciates the closer it comes to experience.
In fiction, the stranded setting, wherever it may occur, often an island, is an old one. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe’s 1719 book, is considered by many to be the first English-language novel. In it, the protagonist is a castaway who spends decades on a desert island. The pirate Alexander Selkirk has been called “the real” Robinson Crusoe. Disputed as the claim may be, in 1704 Selkirk spent four years stranded by himself on an island in the South Pacific after an argument with his captain over their dodgy ship and a subsequent request to be castaway. In 1875, Jules Verne published the epic The Mysterious Island, in which several American Civil War prisoners from the North escape on an air balloon and soon find themselves washed up on, you guessed it, a mysterious island. Maybe that sounds familiar. As it happens, Verne’s novel is also said to draw on Selkirk’s story.
Supplied
After four centuries of English-language fiction about being stranded, the boundaries of a good tale have been stretched far. Like the universe, however, those boundaries seem to keep expanding. In The Martian (Crown, 2014), Andy Weir contributes to the swell. He does so not by setting his book in space – that’s been done. He does so by combining the space setting with a thorough, compelling, detailed account of the science of survival on Mars: a mix of botany, chemistry and engineering, conveyed through the effortless, dad-jokey charm of his protagonist Mark Watney. The book is also a study in problem-solving and human psychology affixed atop the trials of job remade for space travel.
The Martian is delightful, which is all the more impressive for a story about an astronaut left for dead alone on the Red Planet. The political machinations at home, inside NASA, and the concurrent story of Watney’s fellow astronauts in their ship Hermes on their way home after abandoning the mission and Watney buttress the novel. Not that they must. From the first chapter, you’re in Watney’s corner as he assesses his fate in a log entry, the novel being made up mostly of dated entries for posterity. “I’m stranded on Mars,” the first entry reads. “I have no way to communicate with Hermes or Earth. Everyone thinks I’m dead. I’m in a Hab designed to last 31 days.” And so goes every tale of being stranded – and the subsequent struggle to survive.
If Mark Watney is a compelling character, the sort who makes decisions you can identify with, if not imagine yourself replicating, Rachel Hawkins’s lot in Reckless Girls (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2022) is the antithesis to The Martian. In this thriller, the protagonist, Lux, follows her partner, Nico, to Hawaii. Nico, who sails, takes on two clients and agrees to bring them to Meroe Island, the site of a 19th-century shipwreck for a short stay. The party runs into strangers and finds themselves stuck on the island as histories intersect, mysteries abound, and bodies begin to pile up.
With a slight noir edge, a deliberate, if flawed, nod to Agatha Christie, Reckless Girls also draws a bit of a Gone Girl wake. But as a book about being stranded, with the island closing in, you’re left asking how it is the characters are stuck there given they have more than one opportunity to leave. You’re also left to wonder why they make the foolish decisions they do. If you’ve seen films about teens caught in the woods being hunted by a psychotic slasher, you’ll know what it’s like to yell, “What in god’s name are you doing?” Reading this book is like that. Still, you’ll tear through it in a day or two. Call it a beach read. Maybe an island beach read.
Supplied
Novels about being stranded, the good ones, have the capacity to situate the reader in the dire straits of the protagonist. Still, the distance between reader and the reality of being stuck affect a quaintness that separates fiction from non-fiction. Just over a decade ago, four friends and I were lost on our way across Mongolia. Somewhere off the “main” road – if you’ve driven in Mongolia, you know “main” road is a relative concept – we realized we were lost. The landscape looked awfully similar any direction we looked, and just as similar to the hundreds of kilometres we’d driven. For a moment, we wondered if we had accidentally wandered across the border into China. We, at least I, also wondered if it was time to send an emergency beacon. Better to pay the rescue cost than be lost, stranded, in the steppe, which has claimed its share of stranded souls. We found our way back to our route with a map, compass and some deep breaths, but the romance of being lost and stranded faded.
There may be no better non-fiction book about being stranded than Into Thin Air (Anchor Books, 1997). Jon Krakauer’s account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster that claimed eight lives is raw and honest. Like David Grann’s The Lost City of Z, which details Percy Fawcett’s Amazon search for the mysterious settlement, the book strips away the chest-thumping adventure veneer that separates the Hollywood blockbuster film or dime-store escapade novel from the horror that all too often attends “adventure.” Krakauer’s account is self-aware and searching. At times, the characters read as if they were creations of the novelist, but that is the skill of the narrative non-fiction writer at work.
Krakauer demystifies Everest and mountaineering while critiquing the industry, assessing what went wrong on the mountain that year, and running down the history of what Tibetans historically call Chomolungma and Nepalese call Sagarmatha. As Krakauer notes, statistically, 1996 was a less deadly year on Everest than average. But that doesn’t detract from the tragedy he recounts and the series of errors that exacerbated it. Indeed, if anything, it adds to it.
As a warning of how things can go wrong, how they can change in a moment, without notice, the opening chapter of the book echoes a theme consistent in fiction and non-fiction writing on being stranded. Writing about the groups who prepared to summit Everest in May of 1996, Krakauer writes, “Nobody can speak for the leaders of the two guided groups involved, because both men are dead. But I can attest that nothing I saw early on the afternoon of May 10 suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down.”
Supplied
Krakauer’s words recall a bit of what the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote in another context. “Life can only be understood by looking backward; but it must be lived looking forward,” he wrote. And so must think every character, invented or real, who finds themselves stranded and wondering, “How did I get here?”