Wild and Distant Seas
Nantucket. Moby-Dick. Four generations of women who blossom via an inner force that’s part insight, part magic; the rediscovery of a father by a daughter whose mother died years earlier, in a journey that led to a distant continent across fierce seas. Take all of this and meticulous historical detail of 19th-century New England, add courageous mothers who ask more than simple romance in their lives, and you have the marvelous resilient core of Wild and Distant Seas.
Springing from a passage in Melville’s Moby-Dick that describes a woman running a seafarers’ inn on the island of Nantucket, this novel opens with Evangeline Hussey and her ability to “see” what has happened to people around her. Widowed yet unable to reveal her beloved husband’s death, for fear she’ll lose her livelihood and home, Mrs. Hussey manages with the help of other driven women.
When she loses her heart to a young sailor named Ishmael, whose companion is the mysterious Queequeg, her vision tells her she’s in fresh danger. But she lacks clarity: “If I did not know what was coming, how could I stop it? Would this be the time I shattered? Would the price of relief again be blood and water and wailing?”
Grounded in the small passionate details of the great Melville novel, yet seeking meaning in a very different way, the women that Roberts follows, one generation after another, develop strength from their own independence and their need, despite this, to be loved with integrity and passion. Far more readable than Melville’s work for a modern reader, this luscious novel may open a longing to re-explore the tale of the whale and the men who pursued it.
