Woman at Sea

Catherine Poulain

Jonathan Cape, £12.99

Review by Alastair Mabbott

The lined, weatherbeaten face in the cover photo leaves one in no doubt that Catherine Poulain is the real deal. As part of a lifetime of hard manual work, she spent nearly a decade as a fisherman in Alaska, and this novel, her first, is written with the authority of a woman who knows as much about life at sea as Melville or Conrad ever did.

It follows Lili, a single-minded young Frenchwoman who makes her way from France to Alaska to pursue her dream of fishing at the edge of the world. As a novice, she has to prove herself. As a woman, she has to work twice as hard to do so. And she does, blinking back tears when she’s scolded by the skipper but basking in his praise when she does well. Lili glories in the stress and exhaustion of pushing herself to “conquer the limits of this small body”, and Poulain’s prose conjures up the conditions with vivid, terrifying clarity. The freezing cold. Leaking boots. Decks strewn with fish guts. Becoming smeared with the rotting squid used as bait. Aboard the fishing vessel Rebel, skippered by the lanky Ian, Lili loses her sense of day and night and adjusts to a new way of reckoning time.

But Woman at Sea does more than simply depict the life of an Alaskan fisherman with documentary precision. Poulain delves deeply into Lili’s character to examine what motivates a young, slightly-built Frenchwoman to test herself against the elements. Constantly flirting with death to feel fully alive is something the other fishermen in the bars of Kodiak understand. “You come back for more because the rest of the world feels bland,” one remarks, acknowledging that they live a heightened existence beyond others’ ken.

Indeed, after the exhilaration of Lili’s maiden voyage, there’s a terrible comedown: the monotonous limbo on shore waiting for another boat. A suddenly aimless Lili joins the other fishermen anaesthetising themselves with alcohol. The men onshore, who had seemed surprisingly respectful when she first arrived, begin to hit on her constantly. There seems to be no way she can sustain a meaningful relationship with the man she’s fallen in love with.

But there are other forces at work within Lili, alongside her addiction to the adrenaline rush, threatening to undo her. Submission plays a major role in her psychology, and there are suggestions of a barely-repressed death wish, seen when she recklessly ignores an infection caused by a poisonous fish spine, speaks of dying to earn a crewmate’s respect and contemplates throwing herself overboard so that the immigration authorities can never send her back to France. Eventually, she wonders if she chose this path so that she could write her own ending to her life. For Lili, control, surrender and a kind of invincibility are all intertwined.

It’s an extraordinary and ultimately life-affirming novel, distilling what 58 years on this earth has taught Poulain about herself, and about others who share her desire to reach the edge of the world and peer over into what lies beyond.