The Road to Ghost Cabins by Fred Pawle
A few years ago Fred Pawle and I spent an evening in Sydney talking shop over Peking duck. As an old-school newspaper journalist, he’s something of an enigma in the surf publishing game. That doesn’t say much about his writing, but it does inform the depth of knowledge and experience he brings to the process of putting together a story. All of the newspapermen I know posses a particular aura, a certain no-bullshit, lucid intensity that borders on the manic. As if their gears are tirelessly whirring even when they are sitting in repose. Pawle has that, as well as a certain forthrightness that comes from being told to “fuck off” enough times for it to have lost much of its sting.
I stay in touch with Pawle. We email him every now and then – mostly about writing and journalism. So when he told me he’d written a book it scared me a little. As someone who knows what it’s like to struggle with writing, to be broken down and only partially rebuilt by the words you can commit to the page, I always try to support anyone who wishes to do it. This certainly includes anyone who has gone through the wrenching process of actually completing a novel. So not only did I read Pawle’s book, I offered to review it here. The problem, of course, was that if I didn’t like it, I would be caught between writing an honest review and wanting to do right by a friend.
Pawle hasn’t written a masterpiece. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend it to those who don’t surf. He has, however, penned something wild and haunting, that, like a piece of dirty glass you have stepped on, works its way deep under your skin and reasserts itself at odd moments. It is a dark elegy to modern surfing, a tortured love note to a corrupt culture, and a bitter satire of late capitalist cannibalism.
Satire is not a word we hear much in this game, nor what I expected of a novel calling itself “The Road to Ghost Cabins,” but we are plunged into it from the first chapter, when Nugulu, a cab driver from an anonymous tropical dictatorship is harangued by the thinly fictionalized chairman of a global surfing tour named Bill Reynolds about the mystic joys of surfing. It is a dry, and uncomfortably close to home send-up of the bullshit that nearly all surfers spew from time to time. Pawle has an ear for language and nails Reynolds’ tone, along with those of all of the other characters that inhabit his surfing netherworld.
This book is ultimately about the how and the why of a trip to the mysto wave Ghost Cabins: the avaricious corporate lackeys who need to push soft good sales, the pro surfer nursing a few addictions, the has-been local standout, turned team manager (glorified yes man) who hates his young charges almost as much as he loves to bask in their short-lived limelights, and the greed, anger, futility, frustration and shallowness that are the predominant undercurrents of it all. Pawle dishes all these things with an impeccable sense of dark humor that is as compelling to read as it is grim.
Grim. That is the best word to describe three quarters of this book. There is a palpable sense of loss in both the drug-addicted Brad Bones, formerly the best surfer in the world, and his mirror image, the quietly desperate, Marty Brittle, who has been brought to his knees by a lifetime in the middle ranks of the surf industry. Both men, like every character in the story, resemble surf characters that we vaguely know. This is perhaps the great strength and weakness of the entire book. Each character feels true to life without feeling like an actual individual. Instead they are all puppets who remind us of many, but no one in particular.
Pawle also struggled a bit with character development. He jumps between each one just as we are getting settled, and so despite hinting at interesting layers, we are never given more than sketches of any character. This is especially true of Ngulu, who, for much of the story, is sloppily drawn with rather dubious, stereotypical shades. This would perhaps be more forgivable if he were not the only fully satirical character in the book. As it stands, it feels a little exploitative. Pawle’s master work is Colin, a corporate sociopath who bullshits his way into a job in the upper echelons of a surf company and gives the reader a lens through which to marvel at the utter mediocrity of it all. He’s a nasty piece of work, but wonderfully easy to root for as we have the feeling that he is just what the industry deserves.
Pawle cops out a little in the end, tacks on some uncharacteristic optimism and even a hint of nostalgia, but what sticks with us is a sense of lingering horror (if that’s not too strong a word) over what surfing has become. Through the endless navel gazing, the celebrity culture, and, yes, even the drugs, Pawle paints a scene that is a nightmarish corruption of some distant and idealized past that has not been forgotten so much as it has been remembered to death: mined and plundered for all it was worth in stock options and global shorts sales. If the act of surfing is a wonderfully pre-modern artifact, Pawle reminds us that the leviathan of surfing is little but a post-modern facsimile. In the end, Ghost Cabins suggest that a hint of something worthy still whispers in the heart of this beast, and indeed cannot be extinguished, but it’s far from uplifting.
This book should be required reading for anyone who takes surfing as a culture seriously. If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, it’s not meant to be. In an age where doing something that has no value to the market is becoming anathema, the most benign activities are becoming the most endangered. Pawle seems to believe that surfing, no matter how degraded it becomes as a culture, will always hold a certain, intangible ace up its sleeve separating the purity of the act from the ugliness of the scene; I’m not sure I agree with him, but perhaps you, dear reader, should go read The Road to Ghost Cabins, and decide for your self. It will not motivate you to get out and ride waves, but it will make you think about what the culture of surfing has lost, and more importantly, what it still might become.
