Melodie Muses On A Modern Shipwreck
(this is NOT a children’s book)
An Excess Of… by Stuart Aken is an eco-thriller with adult themes and strong language.
Shipwreck has to be scary
The book starts in the dead of night, with one of the characters woken suddenly in their cramped cabin, the floor already wet with seawater. Shipwreck has to be scary, especially when it happens without warning at night.
This wasn’t a luxury cruise liner, or indeed a very large ship, and things generally seemed rather ramshackle. It was carrying a few passengers but must have been making its money from its cargo — but what was that cargo? Something illicit for sure, but not live animals.
The only living beings aboard that ship were people — except that a ship is too large, too much its own world, not to have been colonised by other creatures. The antics of the humans in this book keep the plot full to bursting, but my remit is to ask an animal question, so I did.
Here’s what I asked Stuart Aken:
Did any of the animals on board the original ship make it — perhaps survive and create their own colony on the island as they watch the humans degenerate?
Here’s Stuart’s answer:
The only animals aboard the ship were the ship’s cat and rats. None made it to the only lifeboat and therefore none travelled to the island.
The remote island previously had a small population who raised chickens, goats and pigs. But droughts in the 1960s forced them to leave their beloved home and, being poor people, they took all their livestock with them.
Native creatures on the island include a few species of birds and some visiting seabirds, tree frogs, and marine life, including turtles and various types of crab.
The rats that often arrive as passengers on cargo ships visiting various islands never arrived simply because no such ships ever went there. The people travelled long distances by native canoes to collect necessities they couldn’t grow, and made sure they travelled back home unaccompanied by unwelcome rodents. The sea, of course, is a source of fish to be caught and eaten.
Ah ha! So there was a ship’s cat. And rats, of course. Is there any ship anywhere that doesn’t have a resident colony of rats? And in a ramshackle ship shirking health and safety guidelines, rats will have a lot of leeway. They are resourceful animals and great opportunists.
On behalf of the ship’s animals, I am hijacking the plot and setting a couple of rats’ nests in hidden corners of the lifeboat. As to the rest of the rats and the cat, cats are notoriously reluctant swimmers, but it’s a skill they possess, and rats are proficient in the water. Not that they are likely to have made it ashore under their own steam, but the vessel broke up with quite a bang and would have generated sufficient flotsam to keep one feline and a whole colony of rodents afloat to dry land.
If characters in a sequel to An Excess Of… revisit the island of this book, I think they are in for a surprise.
Melodie Trudeaux Is All About The Animals
That’s why Melodie has homed in on the animal angles of every one of the books she muses on. Melodie Trudeaux is the alter-ego of crime writer, Penny Grubb.
Melodie’s latest, Horse of the Same Colour…
… is a MABLE 2022 spotlight book along with An Excess Of… Please come and join Melodie and all the other authors at Fantastic Books Publishing’s
It’s free and it’s fun!
