

Review: 'Full Fathom Five' by Gordon Chaplin

To many readers, environmental stories are dead on arrival. They lack human characters, the thinking goes, and they're predictable: a creature or ecosystem is gravely damaged by humanity's greed. So maybe it's best not to bill "Full Fathom Five: Ocean Warming and a Father's Legacy" as an environmental tale.


Really, it's a homecoming.

It's the story of an Englishman-turned-U.S. citizen in the Bahamas who marries into wealth and finds himself leading a scientific study of the Caribbean nation's aquatic life unprecedented in its scale and methods. It's also the story of his son's coming of age. And, yes, it's the story of coral reefs ravaged by development and climate change.

That boy, author Gordon Chaplin, is asked to return to his childhood home 50 years later, in 2004. He is the last surviving member of a team that helped compile what remains the largest collection of Bahamian fish in the world — more than 61,000 specimens — and the landmark tome that emerged from their expeditions, "Fishes of the Bahamas and Adjacent Tropical Waters." The 58-year-old tells an inquiring scientist from Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences that he remembers the old collection sites as well as he remembers the rooms in his old house. But like that old wooden bungalow, he will find the world he remembers no longer exists, if it ever did.

In the 1950s the author's father, Charles C.G. Chaplin, pioneered the use of scuba gear and Rotenone — an organically derived fish poison that stuns or kills most marine life in an area, making it easier to collect samples of rare species. (Its environmental effects are small-scale and short-lived.) When the author is invited to help lead a contemporary study for the Academy measuring the effects of the intervening half-century on the coral reefs of his childhood, it's very much an invitation to retrace his heroes' footsteps. He dives in, but with some trepidation.

"Like many children of the sixties," Chaplin writes, "I've always had trouble with the idea of home." He flunked out of Cornell University's undergraduate wildlife conservation program after one year, more interested in "Animal House"-style antics than academic rigor. He pursued journalism, writing for Newsweek in Southeast Asia and later becoming a staff writer for the Washington Post Magazine. It satisfied his wanderlust, but it also widened the rift with his family. And in "Full Fathom Five," Chaplin returns home too late to fully resolve a conflicted relationship with a father he only came to know by reading his diaries.

Chaplin comes to understand how his father resisted being labeled a gold digger for marrying into wealth. An ensuing affair and fanatical devotion to science was how he broke free, but Chaplin learns it may also have helped drive his mother into reclusion. That knowledge casts a pall over the Chaplin's present-day home in New York City, which is decorated with his father's paintings and mosaics of barracudas.

Measured against the elder Chaplin's benchmark, the reefs have not fared well. Climate change has influenced the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycles, the author concludes, threatening the delicate balance of his beloved Caribbean ecosystems. New resorts pump pollution into the fragile waters. The picture is grim but not hopeless; the return studies found no statistical change in biodiversity on the dying reefs. But they found different kinds of fish. The ecosystem's resilience is impressive, Chaplin observes, but "it is living on borrowed time."

Rarely are environmental stories so intimately personal and readable. Chaplin's prose is bright and direct. A "Dramatis Personae" accompanies the text, with luminously illustrated plates detailing the appearance and behavior of several Bahamian fish species. "Full Fathom Five" isn't Chaplin's first memoir; "Dark Wind" (1999) chronicles the drowning of the author's partner, Susan Atkinson, for which Chaplin still blames himself. That tragedy figures in here, too. The title phrase, a version of which was also read at Atkinson's funeral, comes from Shakespeare's "The Tempest":

Full fathom five, thy father lies;

of his bones are corals made .....

Chaplin's childhood home on Hog Island (now Paradise Island) was leveled to make way for condos that never came. His memoir parallels the disruption of an ecological community with his own anxieties about his past and his father's legacy. By focusing on people instead of places, "Full Fathom Five" transcends the criticisms pre-emptively lobbed at many environmental stories. Framed as a bittersweet homecoming, Chaplin's book nonetheless packs a philosophical punch — a marine version of Aldo Leopold's "land ethic": If we let our natural systems go to waste, we may realize too late that we have no home to return to.

Chris Bentley is a freelance writer and editor based in Chicago.

"Full Fathom Five"

By Gordon Chaplin, Arcade, 248 pages, $24.95

Copyright © 2017, Chicago Tribune