Fantastic sea adventure. Read this review:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...VGMKG1DVV1.DTL

David Masiel, a Bay Area novelist who has written beautifully about the heart-shattering life aboard tugboats and icebreakers in the Arctic Ocean, takes us to warmer waters in his second work of fiction, "The Western Limit of the World," a novel about the last voyages of a decrepit chemical tanker and the life and death of its desperate crew.

Everybody on board the rusting converted World War II tanker known as the Tarshish seems to be suffering from some sort of delusion. Harold Snow, the boatswain, has seniority at sea and in the tangled pains of troubles that have brought him on board this particular ship. He's madly in love with Beth, a young half-British, half-African woman, who works as an able-bodied seaman. And he's in line for a desperate clash with Bracelin, the chief mate, with whom he's compromised in a shady deal that has to do with illegal chemicals and insurance.

Snow is a complicated man, quite interesting enough with his lingering traumas from shipboard adventures during World War II and his family ghosts to hold our attention throughout. Bracelin is a near-monstrous figure, a grotesquely drawn, fully tattooed and psychologically convincing rogue who would serve well in a Cormac McCarthy novel, with his most obvious marking being the analemma on the inside of his left forearm: "A figure-eight pattern with the approximate proportions of a bowling pin, the analemma showed the variation of the sun's position in the sky, as if you stood on a spot at the equator and took a snapshot of the sun at the same hour of every day for a full year. ... He could figure his position at sea using only a sextant, a chronometer, a pencil, and his tattoos."

When a young American from Berkeley named George Maciel comes on board to work his way around the world on the Tarshish, his ties to Snow (Maciel's late grandfather sailed with the old sailor, and his memory haunts them both) and his immediate affection for the appealing Beth signal an impending psychic collision that lies not all that far ahead.

The insurance fraud that Snow and the chief mate hope to perpetrate requires that they change the name of the ship. When the Tarshish becomes the Elizabeth, the water turns rough and, while the ocean roils around them, emotional storms begin to rage among the crew. After the captain, pretty much a ghost when we first meet him, dies at sea, poisoned, possibly, by the menacing chief mate, Bracelin takes command of the ship. And Snow's idea of reality, even without mefloquine, the hallucination-inducing anti-malaria drug that everyone except him is taking as they approach the tropics, wavers and shimmers.

Which means, as Snow's is the presiding point of view on board, that most of the novel's pages take on that same quality. This produces some fine effects, both in the perceptions of the characters and in the prose. As when the tanker approaches the coast of Sierra Leone with its load of various dangerous chemicals and we see that "Africa lay like a green and orange mystery to the east. With the pilot aboard, the closer they came to the oil terminal at the port of Kissy, the more Snow smelled burning wood mixed with trash. It had a sour edge to an otherwise pleasant smell that reminded him of burn days as a boy, in his uncle's backyard at the old incinerator, the smoldering scent of food on paper, of meat on wood. A haze hung over Freetown and extended offshore, a haze of whited sand fog blown from the inland Sahara on Harmattan winds."

For reasons both private and public, Snow disembarks and leads a small band of crew members inland, where they get caught in a political uprising, with murderous results. Their retreat back to the sea becomes no less dangerous as storms threaten to tear apart the old vessel with the new name. "Rain flooded the pipeline network, waves sheeting off the deck as the ship rolled through the squall, a wave breaking over the bow and tearing through the pipeline thrashing chaotic around valves, hitting an obstruction to pop skyward and then rush toward gravity. A wave tore loose the padding around one hole and ran past the hose and down into the tank in a swirl, the hoses continuing to emit their paltry ballast. ... The ship slammed a trough and seemed to thud to a standstill."

But the prose never rests as the story surges toward its unpredictable conclusion, giving us, in its best moments, a mix of emotional disquiet and fluid sense of action -- as in the moment when Snow, caught up in a malarial vision, looks out over the ocean and sees it "boiling, in great roiling bubbles and extrusions of foam and exhalations of gas. Boiling! He himself was boiling. His brain baked by fever, infested by parasites. He could feel them in there, lunching on red blood cells and excreting the black bile of his own dying humors. ... the heat grew oppressive. A hot wind raked his skin. ... Distant thunder squalls rose off the horizon ... the great vaulting columns of cloud like the smokes of the earth itself."

We're supposed to bow down to Conrad and Melville on the question of the sea in fiction. And we should. But David Masiel offers some fascinating dramas of his own. If they're not as morally urgent as those of the masters, they more than make up for that with their own feverish way of charting the limits of our world.

Alan Cheuse is a novelist and a book commentator for NPR.