Light Piercing Water (Guest Boy)
by Djelloul Marbrook
Mira Publishing House
ISBN 978-1-908509-06-2
review by Steve Glines
There is always something fun about a book written in
English by an author whose native language is not English. Non-native speakers
are often very inventive with our language, using interesting metaphors where
we might use a cliché. There are other times when the reader skids to a halt
with the need to decipher a sentence or paragraph that contains English words
embedded in an alien grammar. Fortunately this does not happen very often in
this first of a trilogy that vaguely mirrors The Odyssey or so the author
promises.
The hero of this thin volume is Bo Cavalieri, a seaman,
former U.S. Navy frogman and an artist extraordinaire. Bo, which stands for
boson, is half Arab and half German with an Italian step father. OK so we know
he's conflicted right there. The book opens with a small convoluted plot that
leads to a young Arab boys suicide. Bo takes it upon himself to deliver the
remains to the boys home town in Algeria. The task being done Bo
signs up with a tramp steamer that's been outfitted by a rich British eccentric
(aren't they all) and his mistress to do underwater archaeology.
For the middle two quarters of the book Bo and his British
companions wander the coasts of North Africa, Greece, the Red Sea and somehow end up in Oman. Bo meets
the Sultan of Oman who likes Bo and calls him Sinbad. A few pages later they
discover an important ship wreck. A few pages after that Bo quits for almost no
reason and becomes captain of a small Omani ship bound for the African coast.
On the return trip Bo discovers that they are carrying slaves. He kills the
owner, renames the ship and divides the spoils between the rest of the crew
after dropping his female slaves off on a random beach somewhere.
Bo joins up with another tramp steamer headed to England. While
this steamer is laid up for repairs he goes to Scotland to visit his fathers
former girlfriend. Bo thinks she might be his real mother because his real
mother is such a witch (See I told you he was conflicted). She isn't but he
(and we) learn all about how Bo came to be and why he is such a good artist:
his mother was a good artist. We learn his father was killed in a jealous rage
but it's immaterial to the story. After having a one night stand with his
fathers ex-girlfriend, Bo is back aboard ship and ends up in New York City where we learn he owns an
apartment. The apartment had been rented out to some drug dealers so Bo throws
them out and proceeds to get completely drunk, destructively drunk. His free
time is spent telling us about his childhood and how he loves to swim the East River. It's after one of these swims that Bo is
attacked by a bout of amnesia and ends up in Belleview psychiatric hospital.
That's it. There are two more volumes in this trilogy so
it's safe to say that Bo remembers who he is unless the rest is all
retrospective but we are given no hint, no foreshadowing of what will happen to
him. We have only the publishers promise that the trilogy echoes The Odyssey. A
good read, for an immortal.
