Alec Patric (A.S. Patric) won the Miles Franklin for his novel Black Rock, White City, and this next book – Atlantic Black (Transit Lounge 2017) – is another literary wonder that transports us to a particular time and place, and into the mind of a specific character. In this case, it is 17-year-old Katerina Klova, daughter of an ambassador, embarking on an ocean voyage across the Atlantic. The entire story takes place over a day and a night, the last day of 1938 and the eve of the New Year, and the dawning of 1939. Katerina is aboard the RMS Aquitania, a luxury vessel steaming across the vast seas towards a world that is about to change beyond recognition with the horrors of the approach of another world war.
Half of Katerina’s family – her father and brother – are absent (initially we are uncertain as to the reasons, but much is revealed as the novel progresses), and Katerina is travelling with her mother, Anne, who suffers a psychotic break at the very beginning of the story. She is bundled off to the ship’s hospital or infirmary, and the adolescent Katerina is left to wander the decks and rooms of the immense vessel, encountering other passengers and crew both friendly and sinister, with chance encounters teasing the edges of our knowledge about her and her family’s circumstances, and the fate of those she loves. The novel is peopled with a cast of memorable and unique individuals, each playing a cameo role in Katerina’s peregrinations throughout the evening.
Katerina is a complex character, at one level innocent and naïve, but at another level strangely worldly. She smokes opium, for example, and certainly thinks rather deeply about those she encounters. She is a character suffering both the actions of others against her, and also enacting her own agency towards getting what she wants.
The book gives a detailed depiction of life aboard a ship of that era, both the luxurious berths with accompanying service, and the more lugubrious scene of life below decks, with animals transported to zoos, cargo of all manner, dingy crew quarters and seedy and manipulative sorts.
As Katerina navigates her way through the world of strangers and strange customs, and as the world around her disintegrates and fragments with the shadow of conflict, we are given a distinctive and insightful view into her mind, her thoughts, her desires, her dreams, her regrets and her fears. The ending is both unexpected and surprising; it hangs there on the page, with questions unanswered, a void of possibility. After having walked so closely with Katerina for an entire novel through only 24 hours, the prospect of leaving her at the conclusion of the novel is a wrench; she has stayed with me, haunting my thoughts.
A.S. Patric is a master of not telling, and it is the absences and white spaces of this novel that magnify its significance.
Atlantic Black – A.S. Patric
