The Water in Between

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY MAY 1, 2000

In the story of a 1984 sailing adventure from Vancouver Island to Tahiti and back, ex-Canadian army doctor Patterson finds himself in the horse latitudes north of the equator, on an idyllic atoll in the South Pacific and in all manner of dull and violent weather. He deftly and modestly chronicles the sea wrack he encounters, how he learned enough to make the final leg of the voyage from Hawaii on his own and how he recovered from a broken heart. That would be accomplishment enough for such a tale, but Patterson attempts to reinvent the genre of travel literature as practiced by Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux. With charming self-knowledge, he sees such writing as missing the ultimate experience of travel: homesickness. Perhaps, Patterson questions, loosening oneself from the habits and possessions of a settled life is not the pinnacle of human experience Chatwin or most memoirists of sea life suggest. Perhaps the purpose of lonesome traveling is a new appreciation of home. After all, how noble is it to be in the wilderness, away from all comforts? "It's not a succession of good and compassionate decisions that leads someone to decide they may not take pleasure again," he writes. It's an original, audacious idea to build into such a story, and Patterson is a good enough writer to construct an engaging read. In the end, the book doesn't create fully satisfying secondary characters nor a resounding conclusion-but those are relatively small criticisms given the insight, authenticity and courage of Patterson's good work.