Hall, Lawrence Sargent Stowaway: A Novel
Hall’s novel presents a nightmarish, and at time hallucinatory, vision of a ship adrift, figuratively and metaphorically, when its command structure fractures due to the illness of her aged captain and her Chief Mate’s inability to cope with added responsibilities. Set on convoy duty during the waning days of the Second World War and through the first months of peace aboard the fictitious freighter LIBERTY BELLE, described by Hall as
“one of the oldest of the Liberty ships, and by war’s end one of the thinnest and flakiest. Yet she had been a veteran of some of the toughest going, and for a cheap, hastily built carrier she had been in her own way a somewhat dowdy heroine. Hers was not the career that fired the spirit of a man-o’-war, but in any event, in every event – she did her necessary unromantic job. That is to say, she did what she was constructed for ... She delivered, and she survived her expendability.”
Madness and lawlessness dominate the novel’s latter sections as the LIBERTY BELLE breaks down in the Indian Ocean en route from Port Said to Freemantle, Australia during what is to be her final voyage. The ensuing chaos and hopelessness recalls Traven’s The Death Ship (1934).