Maurice and Maralyn

A charming, propulsive read, in spite of one of its protagonists. Maurice and Maralyn is the story of an English couple shipwrecked in the middle of the Pacific during a circumnavigation of the globe by sailboat in the 1970s; their 118 days at sea and subsequent rescue was the topic of much contemporary media frenzy. They even published a firsthand account!

What Elmhirst's Maurice and Maralyn contributes to the narrative is the context surrounding their trip: Maurice is curmudgeonly and kind of mean; Maralyn is engaged and vivacious and humble. It is mostly thanks to Maralyn that they make it out alive. They struggle with fame, and when the attention dies down they retreat to the banal life they were originally trying to escape.

They’re mostly unchanged by their harrowing experience at sea, which I think is testament to quite how sturdy British folks were in the aftermath of the war. While adrift, Maurice does vow to change his ways — but later, when they build a new boat and return to sea with a crew and an eye to complete the original voyage, he turns out to be such a drag that one of the crew bails before they've reached their destination.

Maralyn dies in 2002, and Maurice spends the last decade of his life alone and adrift again (do you see what I did there), unable to live without Maralyn but unable to die due to his stout Derbyshire constitution. He writes a memoir, more for himself than for anyone else. He gives a video interview to a shipwreck documentarian: he speaks movingly about the experience, about being alone with the wildlife in the middle of the sea. About the calls of the whales at night. And at one point he admits that if he knew he would be picked up, he’d do it again.

Maurice died in 2017 and had his ashes scattered with Maralyn's in the New Forest.