Every year, anything between 2,000 and 10,000 containers tumble off ships into the sea. They don't make news. But when the containers in question were full of rubber ducks, and when those ducks are still, endlessly and unsinkably, wandering the watery ways of the world and washing up on beaches thousands of miles from the spill, the story became irresistible. Washed-up ducks now go for hundreds of pounds on eBay. They've already inspired books by Eric Carle (of Very Hungry Caterpillar fame) and Christopher Brookmyre, and countless pages of journalistic spilled ink.
Among the first things you learn from Donovan Hohn's book on the subject which is an unusual combination of whimsy and factual punctiliousness is that they aren't rubber and that only one in four of them is a duck. The Floatee bath toys, which ditched in the mid-Pacific en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma, Washington in January 1992, included a yellow duck, a red beaver, a blue turtle and a green frog. But it's the ducks everyone remembers.
The mixture of whimsy and precision is well captured by Hohn's title, delighting as it does in a deflating pun and in its insistence on an exact and unround number. This is, as billed, a consciously Melvillean enterprise a thing of patches and stitches. Moby-Dick's encyclopaedic digressions on scrimshaw and flensing sit alongside passages of narrative excitement or mystical intensity, philosophical meditations and jokes. Hohn's book, too, is a salmagundi. It takes as its organising (or disorganising) principle the idea of following the trail of these bath toys: from a factory in the Pearl river delta to the beaches they washed up on and their route into the Arctic wilderness.
He's also, less literally, following their trail through the culture, wondering why they are yellow; learning about the physics of what happens to big ships in high seas; exploring remote corners of Alaska frequented by eccentric oceanographers and feuding environmentalists; beachcombing and learning about the economics of the international toy trade.
At home as he confesses his wife and infant son make do without him. He ruminates on fatherhood and childhood, the sea and the idea of the sea. He'll say knowingly semi-silly things such as: "The Arctic is the symbolic antipode of the bathtubs of America, and the yellowness of the duck the antithesis of the whiteness of the polar bear, which is to the Arctic what the rubber duck is to the bathtubs of America totem, emblem, mascot." He ruminates, too, on knowledge itself: the more he looks into his subject, the more complicated and interconnected and unknowable it becomes.
Hohn's presence in the book is at once pervasive and slightly elusive. You feel you know him, or a version of him, but at arm's length. He's arch. Yet you can be surprised by an autobiographical aside. He mentions that he was given a rubber duck as a child "on account of the pet name my mother had given me. Back then, before her breakdown and subsequent vanishing act, she liked to call my brother Benjamin Bunny. I, inevitably, was Donovan Duck." Breakdown? Vanishing act? It's a story no sooner glimpsed, than carried away in another direction by the current. Donovan Duck is back to his intellectual beachcombing.
There are digressions on the chemistry of toxins "adsorbed" (a nice word which means sticking to the outside of, rather than sucked into) by pelagic plastic and, alarmingly, the way they bio-accumulate as they pass up the food chain. He finds himself learning about the different types of sea-ice (frazil, nilas, grease, pancake, fast), the caloric value of albatross sick, and the history and practice of oceanography. His theme is drift, and so is his method. Where Moby-Dick is shaped by obsession, Moby-Duck is shaped by curiosity. It shows in the tone.
One of the most striking themes is what a devil of a lot of plastic there is floating around in the sea. In the past few years the World Federation of Scientists, he writes, added plastic contamination to its list of planetary emergencies. "Also on the list: missile proliferation, cultural pollution, and defence against cosmic objects." Some of this plastic washes up by the ton on remote beaches; much never comes ashore. Vast currents such as the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre swirl around, and in their becalmed centres floating material accumulates. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a thousands-of-miles-wide wilderness of plastic water bottles, old trainers, TVs, and foam packaging material in various degrees of disintegration. Plastic, Hohn writes, is "intended to be thrown away but chemically engineered to last. By offering the false promise of disposability, of consumption without cost, it has helped create a culture of wasteful make-believe, an economy of forgetting."
This is as much a literary as an environmental expedition, though. It isn't a book that bludgeons you so much as seeks to seduce you in invites you to drift companionably alongside the author and his Floatees. It won't be for everyone: it's a baggy and structureless piece of work, and some will find the whimsy wearing. I liked it. At its best it is sublime, and if at its worst it's pseudy, it is at least self-mockingly pseudy. Here's something original and eccentric and multi-faceted that tells you a good many interesting things about the world and then, not having an index, maximises your chance of forgetting them. That is, in a way, in keeping.
