Susan Casey. The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean. New York: Doubleday, 2010. 336 pages.
In THE WAVE, Susan Casey looks at the science behind giant waves (towering over 100 ft), which were once thought impossible. Turns out, they’re crashing around the middle of the ocean all the time. Casey talks to scientists who studies the waves, but the bulk of the story is taken up by tow surfers—surfers who use jet skis to get into position to ride mammoth waves. As she tells it, these are heroic heroes, dashing off to exotic locales to face death and brave danger.
The thing is, just because these guys do risky stuff, doesn’t make them interesting. And they really don’t come across as that interesting, if you’re not into surfing and you don’t idolize bronzed, risk-taking men with good teeth. In fact, when you consider the risks that these guys take just “for the rush,” they seem pretty self-centered. I can’t understand how someone with kids would be willing to risk their life over something as inconsequential as tow-surfing, just to say that they rode a huge wave. This makes the narrative a difficult one to follow. Even if these guys risk their lives, they have only themselves to blame for it. It’s like reading about a competitive eater waiting for the results of his cholesterol screen–sure, we’ll feel bad if he’s unhealthy, but it’s hard to feel much sympathy for him.
The two most appealing characters in the book were the fishing boat captain who turned his boat around and refused to be all radical and ferry the daredevils out on a day when three people (including a surfer) were killed by giant waves because he wouldn’t “risk his livelihood” over it. Smart guy, with some perspective. Then there was a guy who genuinely took risks, but for an actual reason: marine salvage captain Nicholas Sloane, who faces the same adverse conditions as the tow surfers, but for good reasons–to salvage at-risk ships, saving lives and often preventing toxic cargo from being spilled into the ocean.
In the end, it’s a decently-written book, with some nice detail, but it falls flat because it’s just impossible to really identify with any of the major characters. That, and an underlying scientific paradox: though there isn’t enough data to prove conclusively that giant waves have gotten larger recently, several scientists in the book claim that they are, and man-made climate change is the culprit. One scientist, Peter Janssen, admitted that there was no longitudinal data to even prove that waves are getting larger, much less that human activity has anything to do about it. In the next breath, though, he assures us that he “is quite sure it is happening.”
Sloane and his crew would have made for a much more compelling read. At least I would have cared about them.