“Furious: Sailing into Terror” Rises to the Lofty Portals of Romanticism

Book Review: Furious: Sailing into Terror, Jeffrey James Higgins (Texas: Black Rose Writing, 2021)

The first line of Furious: Sailing into Terror by Jeffrey James Higgins is “I wanted to die.”  The last line, spoken by the same character, is “I had a life to live.”

Between those lines in one of the most harrowing dramas of sheer will to live I have ever read. What could have been a “genre novel” of “action/adventure” or “thriller” or “horror” (all that is there) approaches a triumph of literary Romanticism. It is transformed because the existential challenges that threaten to overwhelm the will to live are faced even as the protagonist struggles against the  psychology with which she begins:  “I wanted to die.”

A protagonist with a wish to die is thrown into a situation where supreme will to live is needed to have the barest chance of survival.

The intense, soul-probing conflict  is that the protagonist with a wish to die is thrown into a situation where supreme will to live is needed to have the barest chance of survival.

Dagny Steele, a young pediatric surgeon with a brilliant record and prospects, and a very sexy young woman, finds her baby girl dead in the crib, a victim of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. She had become pregnant with Emma when she permitted herself a (rare) relationship with Brad, a handsome, wealthy heartthrob, who also is a surgeon in Boston.

Could be a classic girl-reads-on-the-subway romance, right? Here, we depart from “genre.” Dr. Dagny somehow gets pregnant, marries in Boston City Hall (his old Boston family parents won’t go to the wedding), and after a brief interval of happiness, loses her three-month-old daughter. No formula, here.

The death seems to have undone Dagny, utterly. Six months later, she is still an emotional basket case. It is never clear exactly why. Surely because she takes responsibility for anything in her life. Husband Brad, with plenty of money, and a love for sailing, arranges a month on a super-yacht that he and Dagny will sail, alone, from Bali across the vast Indian Ocean to the Maldives. Dagny has an utter terror of water because of the drowning death of her father. But she is the woman who responds to her fears and challenges with a conviction she can do anything; and responds to any problem or threat with the conviction that reason can triumph. And so she agrees to the trip even as her girlfriend curses Brad.

No matter how sophisticated, automated, and luxurious, for the 65-foot yacht to sail through the Indian Ocean without crew, with one amateur sailor and one woman who has anxiety attacks when she sees the ocean, is perilous. Monsoon, pirates, great white sharks, and flash storms all await in the vastness of the sea.

Everything that we learn becomes urgently, intensely relevant to Dagny’s survival.

For me, Furious: Sailing into Terror seemed to drag a little for a few (short) chapters as the author does what editors call an “information dump” about ships, sailing, winds, navigation, sails, equipment, stores, boat architecture …. Well, hang in there, reader: Everything that we learn becomes urgently, intensely relevant to Dagny’s survival. We come to experience something like the reality of “blue water sailing” in the most personal way.

It is easy to make fun of the Romantic novel because of its classic structure:

A guy is walking in the woods, suddenly a bear appears. He runs for a tree and climbs, the bear close behind. He reaches a limb, but it begins to crack; the bear awaits. And then, he has an overwhelming need to move his bowels. As he does, he falls from the branch. He falls head down, his trousers around his ankles snag on a branch. He hangs head down with his pants above around his ankles. He has kept a grip on his knife. But now, he needs his cellphone—way up there in his pants pocket. Maybe he can flex his hips to make the phone work loose and drop. But he will need both hands to catch it. So, tuck his hunting knife between his legs. And then flex his hips like mad … Oh, shit, his fall has dislodged a wasp’s nest, now smashed on the ground ….

Well, if you think that is a tough situation, I can’t wait till you read about what brave, brilliant, beautiful Dagny faces aboard the yacht in the horizonless stretches of the Indian Ocean. In fact, you can’t imagine, and I can’t tell you (it would be a spoiler). You can’t imagine it because although the clues all are there, the catastrophe that unfolds as they sail their perfect yacht is logical but unimaginable.

Dagny must face her aquaphobia, her unresolved mourning, her damaged sexual libido after the loss of Emma—and what happens to Brad. Here, we see an actual medical condition that justifies the “furious” and “terror” in the title.

Every invention, resource, and the will to survive are demanded of Dagny. Every architecture of the yacht and every briefing on navigation and weather becomes breathlessly relevant. She has fled, at last, to the top of the 90-foot mast, the sun frying her bare breasts, her bikini bottoms used to tie herself to the mast. She is peeing stinky, dehydrated urine that pelts the deck below. And on the deck, waiting for her to fall, is the rabid, ravenous, barking beast. But she must descend or die.

I would not call this “genre” fiction or “popular Romanticism.” Higgins never lets down the tension of the plot, but he never lets down the tension of character psychology. The adventure hurtles forward, and there are undoubtedly thrills and chills, but the heroine keeps changing, deepening, growing forward. There is a theme here about how we choose our romantic partners. How easy is the appeal of conventional sexiness, compelling circumstances, the rationalizations. Higgins dramatizes the price we may pay—admittedly, not with a butcher knife on the rolling deck of a ship in the Indian Ocean. But a revelation of the monster over decades.

At some point, I think, the trackless blue Indian Ocean, the thousands of nautical miles where each ship and sailor is alone, becomes, in a Sailing into Terror, a character. Dagny, like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, is “alone, alone on a wide, wide sea; so lonely t’was that God himself seemed not there to be.”

Religion is not an element in Sailing into Terror, Dagny is a woman of reason, science, and worldly loyalties.

Religion is not an element in Sailing into Terror, Dagny is a woman of reason, science, and worldly loyalties. But dangling from the high mast, naked, dying of thirst, the beast waiting for her below, she permits herself a modest prayer.

By the end, every threat, terror, and inner conflict has been faced down. Dagny can be portrayed believably as ready to live the sunlit life she has fought through Hell to preserve. We believe it and it feels somehow deeply rewarding. Even when the nasty mastiff threatens her two new kids on the Boston Common. As she charges, she laughs.

As a kind of footnote, I am intrigued that the author, a decorated intelligence agent in the battle against terrorism, has chosen for his hero a young woman. Perhaps we have our hint in the dedication to his wife: “To Cynthia Farahat Higgins, the bravest woman in the world.”

Devotees of Ayn Rand will speculate on the name of heroine, Dagny Steele.

Devotees of Ayn Rand will speculate on the name of heroine, Dagny Steele. And on the author’s references to reason as the key to life, happiness as life’s goal, and “altruism” as a misguided ideal.

None of it distracted me from this story of this civilized, educated young woman who is stripped of all protection, all civilized support, and naked scoops up a heap of bloody human guts from the deck to fling overboard for circling sharks, diverting them so that she can dive into the sea and swim to a boat where she is safe from the fiery, explosive destruction of the beautiful yacht.

I would call Sailing into Terror literature in the Romantic tradition; it passes even the ambiguous test of popular versus literary style. Its utter intensity reminds me of Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea.

It is the furious and the terrible against reason, life, and heroism.

The agony, tragic death, and awful gantlet are there. But the hero in man wins.

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About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway has written and edited for Savvy Street since its inception in 2014. His essays and interpretative commentaries on breakthrough books have dealt with philosophy, politics, literature, science, history, psychology, and personalities. His new novel, "Retaking College Hill,” became Amazon’s #1 bestseller in political fiction. This year, the Atlas Society published his Pocket Guide to The Fountainhead and Romanticism Reborn--essays on the Romantic movement in literature and its 20th Century revival in Ayn Rand's novels. His collections of essays and short stories and his "Collected Poems" are available on Amazon. He lives in East Hampton with his wife, Robin.