Sea Trial: Sailing After My Father is a non-fiction book about
sailing around Vancouver Island -- a challenging circumnavigation --
while trying to get to the bottom of a medical-legal case that changed
my family's life. It's part adventure, part memoir, a simultaneous
telling of two great stories. It's published by ECW Press, and available
May 7, 2019.
Coming events
I'll give a talk about Sea Trial at the beautiful Vancouver Maritime
Interview with Gregor Craigie of "On the Island", CBC Radio, May 6
Early reviews of Sea Trial
"Harvey has serious skills, and his
riveting story is impossible to put
down." -- Cruising World
Excerpts from a longer review by
Theo Dombrowski, in BC Book Look
"With a sharp eye for telling detail,
and inventive language, Harvey is a
writer who knows how to fix on the
less to evoke the more — and,
simultaneously, to give a sense of
the inner life of stuff . . . Given the
unmistakeable personal stamp in
this book, we can be grateful that
our guide is so engaging. Here is a
voice that cares — and cares deeply. Yet only towards the intense
conclusion do the emotions become torrential. For the most part, the
voice is generally breezy, bright, even when it is intensely engaged.
Self-deprecating humour, lightness of touch, and an inclination to give
a wry account of his own (substantial) fears and uncertainties make
his a very easy voice to listen to, whether chatting about rocks and
reefs or lawyers and legalities."
"The emphasis on the dangers of the trip makes for gripping reading,
not least of all because, except for the very last few bits of the voyage,
the dangers come in so many different forms — and never cease. One
of the more blissful passages is illuminating: “…we surfed an
undulating sea of mercury that, when the sun was out, threw back a
dazzling reflection of towering white clouds and blue sky. The horizon,
at those moments became a wavering silver ribbon.” If the passage
had stopped there, all would be well. It doesn’t. Harvey can’t resist
adding, “…the motion was lulling and seductive — or would have been
had we not entered the stretch of coastline where there were exposed
rock pinnacles as much as five miles out sea. The chart looked as
though a waiter had leaned over my shoulder and murmured, ‘Some
ground pepper with that?’” The evocation of the sailing is beautiful
and the concluding bit is, typical of Harvey, playful and inventive, but
the undercurrent of anxiety never, ever, leaves."
"The other real purpose of the investigation, to discover the elder
Harvey’s character, is movingly achieved. At the beginning, Harvey
claims that “Trying to connect the dots between the handsome violin-
playing medical resident and the querulous old man with the haunted
eyes and the fly away hair didn’t enter my mind.” If forcing himself
(and it does take a lot of forcing in the end) to go through the
documents does achieve anything truly significant, it does that. It
connects the dots. “Mysteries” that had surrounded his father’s life
decisions are, in the end resolved. Perhaps the most overriding of
those — why his father never got over the malpractice incident, even
though it was settled out of court, turns out to be precisely because it
was settled out of court. As a result, the aging doctor, principled to a
fault, feisty, yet grimly humourous, never had the opportunity to
defend himself publicly."
"In solving this mystery, the son really exposes his own vulnerabilities
and compulsions. Though he doesn’t quite say so, Harvey and/or the
book’s persona, in writing the book, seems to be doing what his father
never had been able to do — go public. In this, the reader has a crucial
role to play: it is hard not to escape the sense that it matters, it matters
a lot, that each of us reading the book is part of an ultimate tribunal."