Ship Fever - Andrea Barrett

Ship Fever collects seven short stories and one novella thematically linked by science and the observation of the natural world. Within this context, Barrett explores many secondary themes, involving the relationships between men and women, parents and children (literal and metaphorical), and the living and the dead. Barrett also seems determined to examine her characters lives in retrospective, as the themes of unfulfilled lives or unrealized dreams recurs in most of the stories – as if a whole life could be seen as an extended scientific experiment.

Barrett's style is one of alternating detail and generalization, giving most of the stories a dreamlike or memory-like quality most commonly found in the magical realists. One would expect that stories of science and scientists would be more clinical, and yet Barrett's prose is almost lyrical. Most of the stories here lack a traditional story structure in a narrative sense, but far from meandering, Barrett is tracing the course of her characters' developing sense of self-awareness. It is perhaps ironic, and yet not at all ironic, that many of her scientist characters fail to observe their own lives with the attention they afford the natural world.

Barrett's greatest weakness in this collection is in her depiction of gender relations and the motivations of her male characters. Barrett's female protagonists are well-drawn and sympathetic, but most of her central male characters are disillusioned or disappointed with their careers, feckless in their relationships with their wives or daughters, or simply non-existent for important parts of the narrative.

There is a subtext here about how men judge themselves by their professional advancement and the respect of their peers and women judge themselves by their relationships with their families. Unfortunately, Barrett misses the point that these are different only by degrees, and as more and more opportunities arise for women to advance professionally, many women are choosing to prioritize their careers over families. In one story, Barrett creates a career-minded female scientist, but then softens her by giving her an ineffectual father and showing her communing with the spirit of her deceased mother.

Despite these shortcomings, Barrett's stories are never less than fascinating, especially "Ship Fever", the sprawling novella that makes up most of the book's second half. Set against the backdrop of the typhus epidemic on Grosse Isle, Canada, during the summer of 1847 – which killed over 5,000 Irish emigrants – all of Barrett's considerable talents and forgivable shortcomings are on vivid display. Barrett creates her most sympathetic male character in Lauchlin Grant, a second-rate doctor with an unrequited love for his childhood sweetheart (whose husband is, incidentally, abroad for most of the story, reporting on the potato famine.) Grant decides to work at the Grosse Isle quarantine facility. "Ship Fever" also features the most vivid, muscular prose of the book, as the stink and despair of the sick is practically palpable. Most of the stories in the book tend toward the precious or refined, but "Ship Fever" is exciting and gritty.

It may sound like I found a lot to dislike in this book, but quite to the contrary, I found all of the stories here to be worthwhile, even if flawed in some way. I am reminded of the scene in Contact, when the female astronomer, confronted by the splendor of the universe, laments "They should have sent a poet." Contact's heroine is a more plausible and curious scientist than any of the characters depicted in Ship Fever, but the stories here practically sing and dance and weep about the scientific discovery of the natural world and the inner lives of Mendel, Linnaeus, Darwin, and the countless men and women who followed them.