Laperouse;Folio Biographies

by Anne Pons

Rare Book

303 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 1, 2010

About the author

Anne Pons, née Anne de Larrard était une romancière et essayiste française. Elle fut responsable d'une rubrique culturelle au Point puis à L'Express. Anne Pons a alterné romans et biographies. On doit à ses origines irlandaises La Villa irlandaise et Dark Rosaleen ainsi que Constance ou l'Irlande, une biographie de Constance Markievicz. À noter un roman subtil sur une impasse de l'amour : Les Sentiments irréguliers paru chez Grasset.
Sa passion pour la mer se développe en écrivant avec son époux Alain Pons, agrégé de philosophie, Lady Hamilton, prix Chateaubriand, puis Nelson contre Napoléon et Franklin, l'homme qui mangea ses bottes, grand prix de l'essai de la Société des gens de lettres, prix de la mer, mention spéciale de l'Association des écrivains de langue française. Son dernier ouvrage, James Cook : le compas et la fleur, conte l'histoire passionnante du plus illustre navigateur et cartographe qu'ait produit l'Angleterre. C'est aussi un éclairage sur le début des grandes explorations scientifiques au siècle des lumières.

Elle est la petite-fille de Paul Chack.

Reviews

[Paul Norwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

The very first thing is there are really no useful maps in the book. There are a few images in the center, and perhaps the author didn't have the budget for anything copyrighted, but the images are all public domain engravings that are not very interesting. The only map is a tiny reproduction of a map of voyages made prior to LaPérouse's voyage. Almost nothing on it is legible. If you write about geographical exploration, sorry, you need to include maps. It's not an option. Skip the portraits if you are only allowed a few images. The portrait of the main guy is already on the cover anyway, and I only need to see it once if at all, whereas I need to refer to maps over and over again to keep track. This is especially true if a lot of the place names you use are no longer in use, or now have very different spelling.

While reading the book it slowly emerges that LaPérouse put in a LOT of sea miles, and hardly stopped anywhere for long. He spent a bit more time in established ports, and even in Lituya Bay (modern spelling) where he spent more time than in most other places, he managed to see and experience almost nothing beyond the sea disaster. This presents the author with an unusual challenge. How to make the endless sea miles interesting? How to make a stop for water and supplies interesting when no exploration happened on land? A lot of the time, she does this by alluding to Captain Cook, who is sometimes the real hero of this book. After Lituya Bay, she has LaPérouse sail down to California, not really seeing anything on the way. What a shame! She lists a few place names out of order that he sees from the ship and that's it, all of the Northwest Coast of North America has come and gone with not one interaction. Sorry but that's boring. Worse than your average cruise ship. It's like seeing Europe from an overnight long distance express bus. At one point she talks about how he is too afraid to go between Taiwan (modern spelling) and mainland China, even though that's a huge strait that fleets of aircraft carriers have gone through with their submarine escorts. She should point that out, rather than taking that reasoning at face value.

This would be fine if the author recognized the problem early and pivoted to doing a great job of describing life at sea, but she is too lost in the ship logs and other written records such as letters. Once in a while she reminds us that this is an adventure, but then we get a strong feeling that she has been in the archives of the Musée de la Marine for far too long to remember what it's like to be at sea. For example, she invokes "la traînée laíteuse du sillage," even though at those speeds, there is no wake even for boats that size unless they have a propeller, especially not an opaque white wake.

Another difficult aspect of the book is that she seems to absorb and accept terms about other people that were normal then, but aren't anymore. Please don't go around calling people "sauvages," (p. 258), or "naturels" (p. 266) unless that's a direct quote. I'm amazed that the editor let that through. Again, I suspect that's a result of time in the archives, not the real world.