From Publishers Weekly
Deviating from his usual excursions into the world's rainforests, O'Hanlon (No Mercy) finagles his way onto a Scottish deep-sea fishing boat headed into the North Atlantic waters in January, "the very worst time of year," when storm winds are at their most forceful. The captain and crew seem to like O'Hanlon well enough, even if he is a "mad, seasick writer who's no use to anyone," prone to staring off into the distance when he gets distracted by his thoughts, and he conveys a genuine affection for them as he records their stories. Since there's little to do aboard the ship other than help his marine biologist friend catalogue the various fishes they pull up, and no real scenery to describe besides the wind and the rain, O'Hanlon gets into one long conversation after another—or maybe just one long conversation with intermittent interruptions, as a certain degree of sameness creeps in. O'Hanlon and his shipmates are equally excitable, especially under their sleep-deprived conditions, leading to dialogue peppered with exclamation points and fevered theories about near-total homosexuality within the 19th-century British navy and the possibility that women find trawlermen attractive because fish smell like human pheromones. Though the unrelenting, incongruous manic tone may be off-putting to newcomers, fans of O'Hanlon's trouble-filled sagas will feel right at home. Photos, illus. not seen by PW. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Bad trips are the best. Would you rather watch a home movie of the perfect holiday or hear how it all unraveled? For hardcore fans of wretched travel, Redmond O'Hanlon is as reliable as Imodium. An erudite English writer, expert in natural history, he's known for jungle misadventures whose very titles -- No Mercy, In Trouble Again -- promise biblical woe: leeches, vipers, malaria, piranhas. Where other travelers relish olives in the Tuscan sun, O'Hanlon sucks eyeballs out of monkey skulls in the Amazon. Trawler, O'Hanlon's latest, begins with characteristic masochism. The study-bound writer decides he must take the worst boat ride on Earth -- aboard a commercial fishing vessel in the far north Atlantic -- in the worst possible conditions: a winter hurricane. As he leaves his snug Oxfordshire home for the Scottish port of Scrabster, the reader braces for punishing winds, epic seasickness and foul-mouthed fishermen who park gutting knives behind their ears, all of which O'Hanlon delivers with darkly comic effect. But what separates Trawler from other hellishly funny travelogues is its vision of working conditions so extreme that trauma and shock are routine: simply an occupational hazard. Trawlermen don't just lose their lives with regularity. What they risk losing each time out are their minds. It "occurred to me that I might be going mad," O'Hanlon writes, sure at one point that he's just spoken to the crew when he was, in fact, asleep with his face in a plate. "It's so frightening," he tells his shipmates, "because I thought I was talking to you!" To which one of them replies: "Oh that . . . we all get that." Before going mad, O'Hanlon must endure an awful initiation aboard a rusted "death-trap" whose skipper is so deep in debt that he fishes in a hurricane when every other captain stays in. O'Hanlon, overweight and over-aged at 51 (he could be father to most of the crew), instantly gets sick, flops into walls and gores his palms while gutting fish. The only calm, of sorts, comes in his turbulent bunk or in the stifling galley, where the men tuck into haggis, fried pizza and fried Mars bars. His shipmates also offer O'Hanlon soothing advice. As one puts it: "The weather! Who cares? You either die or you don't -- and you die all together." Most sea tales suffer from romance. In Trawler, there's none. The rare view of ocean is menacing, not majestic: a wall of icy froth and dark water that's as claustrophobic as the gutting room where O'Hanlon spends almost all his time, assisting a marine biologist named Luke. Through him, we meet the phantasmagoric array of creatures the trawler's nets drag up from the deep: rabbit fish, sea-bat, snotfish and the hagfish, which suffocates its prey with slime and bores up the anuses of drowned sailors. As amusing and educational as much of this is, readers who prefer their fish battered or grilled may tire of Luke's exhaustive dissections. The book's human specimens are more enthralling. Trawler, at its best, reads like a black-box transcription of minds trying to stay afloat while crushed by remorseless labor, cold, stress, sleep loss and fear of sudden death. "Your body thinks there's a battle on, and so it's packed you full of adrenalin," Luke says, a few days out. "So the brain tries to order itself for survival, to sort its memories, to clear itself for action by talking instead of dreaming." What results isn't conversation; it's manic, stream-of-subconscious outbursts from the psychic depths. After a week, things get worse. "The brain, memories, pictures, they shut down, they go all dead and dark, they don't care any more," Luke says. "You'll see! We'll be unable to speak. Zombies!" O'Hanlon is just the man to guide us through this meltdown. A Prozac-quaffing depressive who once wrote of ingesting a jungle hallucinogen called yoppo, he knows the bad-trip sensation of watching his own mind unhinge. "I've never felt like this before," he jabbers at Luke. "The boss, the organizer, you know, the internal tough guy that we sometimes resent and always obey, the Mister Big who directs our thoughts, Luke -- he's gone! He's ceased to exist!" O'Hanlon also contrasts the fear he feels in stormy seas with his fleeting terror in the jungle of arrows and machetes: "this, this massively weighted indifferent murderous pounding all about us -- there's no romance about it, nothing personal," he writes. "And it doesn't stop, it goes on and on. " And so does O'Hanlon. His fevered, exclamatory prose and Tom Wolfe-like bursts -- "wop!" "pow!" "ping!" "zap!" -- suit the lunacy of his trip. So do the high-octane confessionals that run for pages, broken only by the occasional "aye" uttered by whoever is listening. But this kind of writing loses flavor at book-length. Ultimately, O'Hanlon overcooks an intense but brief adventure of two weeks or so that would have been fresher with a third of its contents filleted. The nonstop talk in Trawler -- Luke and O'Hanlon banter for whole chapters like mad dons in an Oxford dining hall -- also can't be read as strictly nonfictional. Most of it occurs while the author is frantically gutting fish in wild seas with so much noise that everyone shouts. O'Hanlon is so deranged by fatigue that his rational mind barely works. Yet he repeatedly renders, verbatim, rapid-fire and pitch-perfect monologues of several thousand words, often laced with Orkney and Shetland dialect, on subjects as knotted as European Union fishing quotas and sexual selection by hedge sparrows. This simply isn't credible, and it needlessly camouflages O'Hanlon's virtuosity. He should have taken long passages out of quote marks to make it clear they're filtered through his supple intellect and ear for language. Trawler nonetheless paints a memorable and unexpectedly tender portrait of men who perform one of the world's most demanding jobs. In the end, even the ship's rock-solid first mate falls apart, confiding that he weeps each time he returns to his wife and worries that he'll lose her by loving her too much. Then there's Robbie, who boards the trawler bandaged after a drunken brawl his last night ashore. Mid-storm, he describes the loveliest passage of his young life: a jail stay for decking two cops in a pub. "Prison -- I'm telling you, marvelous! A holiday! A hotel for trawlermen!" Robbie exclaims. In the brig, he enjoyed regular food and sleep and, incredibly, "No cold at all." The idyll ended prematurely when he was released for good behavior. They "owed me three full months!" he indignantly concludes. By the time Trawler docks, the reader knows exactly how Robbie felt. Reviewed by Tony Horwitz Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
In Trawler, O’Hanlon (No Mercy, In Trouble Again), a British naturalist and adventurer, takes readers on a hallucinogenic journey. Extraordinary (or nauseating, depending on the perspective) first-hand accounts of the ship, the close quarters, the smell, the fear, and the seasickness bring his experience to life. It’s no picnic—just call Trawler a hellish travelogue or dark comedy as O’Hanlon’s sleep-deprived sea companions slowly lose their minds. The best parts include conversations between the author and biologist Luke Bullough, who talk science as they examine their monstrous sea findings (portrayed in beautiful black and white drawings). The worst parts include these same musings, which a few critics described as overworked monologues. Still, armchair sailors will find much value in the unfamiliar, nightmarish world O’Hanlon depicts. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
In this utterly zany story, O'Hanlon departs from his usual tropical venues, the Congo, the Amazon, and Borneo, and puts to the seas north of Scotland. As ad hoc assistant to marine biologist Luke Bullough, O'Hanlon sails on the trawler Norlantean, whose captain is in hock to the bank, meaning ship and crew work like madmen to make money, while Luke and O'Hanlon gut the catch to do science. Incessant insomnia, induced by the storm-tossed vessel, produces a hallucinatory, conversational fog. Run-on, page-and-a-half ravings are not rare, punctuated by "Goaaal," "You're barking," and other sundry Scottish expostulations. The conversations swerve from Luke's manic soliloquies about a gelatinous blob hauled up from the deep to O'Hanlon's life-advice to Luke, adventures on the Congo, and the Scottish crew's opinions of him, a landlocked Oxbridge Englishman. O'Hanlon evokes the outsider-looking-in angle in a self-deprecatory way, and somehow manages wonderfully to focus this dizzy portrait of the trawler's life. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"A frenzied depiction of an alien, intensely hazardous way of life, Trawler is both edifying and hugely entertaining. O'Hanlon's is a magnificently original voice: manic, scholarly, funny, sumptuously descriptive, and more than slightly deranged." --Jon Krakauer

From the Inside Flap
Having survived Borneo, Amazonia, and the Congo, Redmond O’Hanlon now ventures into his own perfect storm in the wildest waters he could find.

His rendezvous with destiny begins aboard a trawler converted for deep-sea fishing at a cost of $3 million–which is why its young skipper’s setting out from Scotland’s northern tip when the rest of the fleet is running for safe harbor. Equipped with a fancy Nikon, an excessive supply of socks and no seamanship whatsoever, O’Hanlon joins a crew of five who stock a bottomless hull with the catch, day after sleepless day, even as the hurricane threatens to wash them overboard. While he helps inventory the creatures of the deepest North Atlantic–from jellycats to the wormlike hagfish, unchanged since its evolution more than 500 million years ago–his shipmates exchange manic monologues that range from their woeful longing for loyal women to trade laws and complex fishing quotas.

Rich in oceanography, marine biology and men’s lives, Trawler reveals once again the inimitable spirit of the man Bill Bryson has called “probably the finest writer of travel books in the English language, and certainly the most daring.”

About the Author
A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society of Literature, Redmond O’Hanlon was the natural history editor of The Times Literary Supplement for fifteen years. He lives near Oxford, England, with his wife and their two children. “Among contemporary travel writers,” according to The Washington Post, “he has the best nose for the globe’s precious few remaining blank spots . . . Long may he trudge and paddle.”

The following books by O’Hanlon are available in Vintage paperback:

Into the Heart of Borneo
“A learned and sensitive book as well as a knockabout farce.” –The New York Review of Books

In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon
“When Evelyn Waugh . . . and Graham Greene traveled, the going was still rough . . . Redmond O’Hanlon, hacking his way up an unmapped tributary of the Amazon, fearful (and not without good reason) of ending his days in someone’s cooking pot, has managed to keep that tradition alive.” –Jonathan Raban

No Mercy: A Journey into the Heart of the Congo
“Old-fashioned, gut-wrenching, real-life adventure . . . As much an inner journey that explores fear, religion, magic and childhood as it is a dangerous trek into the depths of the jungle.” –Time

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Having survived Borneo, Amazonia and the Congo, Redmond O'Hanlon now ventures into his own perfect storm in the wildest waters he could find." His rendezvous with destiny begins aboard a trawler converted for deep-sea fishing at a cost of $3 million - which is why its young skipper's setting out from Scotland's northern tip when the rest of the fleet is running for safe harbor. Equipped with a fancy Nikon, an excessive supply of socks and no seamanship whatsoever, O'Hanlon joins a crew of five who stock a bottomless hull with the catch, day after sleepless day, even as the hurricane threatens to wash them overboard. While he helps inventory the creatures of the deepest North Atlantic - from jellycats to the wormlike hagfish, unchanged since its evolution more than 500 million years ago - his shipmates exchange manic monologues that range from their woeful longing for loyal women to trade laws and complex fishing quotas.

FROM THE CRITICS

Tony Horwitz - The Washington Post

Trawler nonetheless paints a memorable and unexpectedly tender portrait of men who perform one of the world's most demanding jobs.

Publishers Weekly

Deviating from his usual excursions into the world's rainforests, O'Hanlon (No Mercy) finagles his way onto a Scottish deep-sea fishing boat headed into the North Atlantic waters in January, "the very worst time of year," when storm winds are at their most forceful. The captain and crew seem to like O'Hanlon well enough, even if he is a "mad, seasick writer who's no use to anyone," prone to staring off into the distance when he gets distracted by his thoughts, and he conveys a genuine affection for them as he records their stories. Since there's little to do aboard the ship other than help his marine biologist friend catalogue the various fishes they pull up, and no real scenery to describe besides the wind and the rain, O'Hanlon gets into one long conversation after another-or maybe just one long conversation with intermittent interruptions, as a certain degree of sameness creeps in. O'Hanlon and his shipmates are equally excitable, especially under their sleep-deprived conditions, leading to dialogue peppered with exclamation points and fevered theories about near-total homosexuality within the 19th-century British navy and the possibility that women find trawlermen attractive because fish smell like human pheromones. Though the unrelenting, incongruous manic tone may be off-putting to newcomers, fans of O'Hanlon's trouble-filled sagas will feel right at home. Photos, illus. not seen by PW. Agent, Peter Matson of Sterling Lord. (Jan.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Having satisfied much of his yearning to see the world, O'Hanlon (Into the Heart of Borneo) takes a voyage that most people would find profoundly unglamorous: an extended journey into the wild seas off the coast of Scotland in a fishing trawler. His apt and evocative descriptions of the ship and of the men who sail on her make it easy to understand why he has earned a place in the short list of contemporary travel writers. While it's doubtful that reading O'Hanlon's title will make anyone want to rush out and book passage on a Scottish trawler, his skillful way with words makes us believe we are safely aboard the Norlantean and sailing off with Luke, Sean, Jerry, and the rest of the irascible crew. His discovery of shipboard superstitions (no green, no women, etc.), his fondness for the idle-time gossip among the men, and his development of an intense fascination for the sea and for the creatures that are hauled up in the fishing nets all contribute in making Trawler a delightful read for travel aficionados. Recommended for larger public libraries.-Joseph L. Carlson, Allan Hancock Coll., Lompoc, CA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews