Seven Years a Mariner
By Kenneth J Clarke
247 pages - $ 20.00
and, for Kindle e-book reader - $9.95
Review by Emerson Draisey

      Seldom, if ever, do any of us have experiences that thrill the imagination for a lifetime. Yet this is exactly what befell an unsuspecting Kenneth Clarke, when he set sail on a seven-year odyssey that would take him beyond the limits of imagination. As if pitched headlong from a bark’s highest spars to the frothing sea below, it was a giddy youth of seventeen who boarded a merchant ship as a cadet officer, wide-eyed and innocent to the ways of the world.
      Blessed by a benevolent fate that would favor this English lad from Cornwall, as he sailed from port to distant port, Mr. Clarke recorded with dependable recall the won-drous world around and beneath him.
      From the exotic sweep of the Suez Canal, with its pyramids and palms for a floating backdrop (crowded with intimidating war-ships), to the towering waves of a South Sea’s typhoon that promises to obliterate both man and ship, this youthful officer takes us faithfully with him across the globe. Dangerous intrigues with Russian and Chinese spies in the Orient give way to the witch doctors and healers of India and Burma, and the dangerous meddling of a corrupt police force in Communist Poland.
      These tales, told in chronological order beginning in 1955, move as naturally as sea waves that flow from one bizarre event to the next, until they resolve themselves in a splendid, final episode that carries all the affirmation of mature satisfaction, one might almost say—in the manner of a symphonic piece. Yet, Seven Years a Mariner is more than a chronicle of times past. It is a testament to the vibrant lives of men who dare challenge the ungover-nable sea and now who live within these pages with a certainty that will never repeat itself—nor be forgotten.
      More than a Conradian yarn based on the color and freshness gleaned by the young eyes of an adventurer, one also discovers an honest rendering of life’s inevitable challenges by an awkward, yet fully game junior officer, and told now by the finished man who lived them. Written in a seemingly offhand way, the tension nonetheless builds in each episode as various plots unravel and arrange themselves with alacrity and surprise.
      The reader will gratefully observe that Mr. Clarke’s use of language is not the hype and cliché of the travelogue writer. And in the strictest sense, this is not a book of memoirs, whereby the writer reflects upon his personal response to happenings in his past.
      The typical memoir invariably will portray the figure of the storyteller in heroic or at least self-important terms, with often uncon-vincing emphasis upon the teller’s interactive role in bringing it all about. In short, the narrator is the center of the story. Not so with Seven Years a Mariner. Rather, Mr. Clarke is a self-effacing raconteur, always in pursuit of a disciplined and dispassionate portrayal of occur-rences as close to reality as they happened.
      This is a book that I can confidently recommend for all.
      Seven Years a Mariner is available at Local Stores, or at the Lake Chapala Society. It can also be purchased in e-Book format from Amazon.com, or for the new Kindle e-book reader on Amazons sub-site.
      Mr. Clarke will hold a book signing event on the gazebo at the Lake Chapala Society from 10:30-12:30 am on Wednesday, July 9. The public is cordially invited.