A Review

Plus 60 cm Acqua Alta

Mariette Navarro spends the length of Ultramarine creating and deciphering the boundaries that an unnamed protagonist has to make for herself in her father’s shadow, in man’s shadow. The captain is professionally competent but, privately, restless. One day, she makes an uncharacteristic decision to let her crew stop the ship and swim out in the deep water. Nothing is supposed to happen that interrupts the schedule. The sea, however, has other plans. When the men climb back aboard, there is one more of them than there was before.

The novel treats the miscount as a problem of numbers, it never explains the extra man. The captain recounts and re-checks, and tries to reconcile a headcount against her own memory, against the plain fact of a stranger standing where a stranger should not be able to stand. The ship, meanwhile, does not stop being a ship, it just stops being fully hers.

The disruption is written as a small clerical impossibility that nobody can afford to say out loud. Doing so would mean admitting we aren’t the only entities with agency, and perhaps we aren’t in control the way we think we are. Something as powerful as the sea can rewrite our terms whenever it desires, it’s just waiting for us to ask. Ultramarine explores the idea that our command over each other, over ourselves, over what we think we can control isn’t absolute. 

There is a clear biblical allegory here that doesn’t need much suggestion, but I’m not convinced that’s where Navarro meant for us to land. Regardless, it’s there, and if I’m being frank, making that allegory more explicit would have elevated the story, a modern yet restrained, sort of heady biblical metaphor. I rated Ultramarine as 60+, ankle deep, because it leans so heavily on the shock value of “there is one extra person on board” that it doesn’t always convince the reader of what dealing with the fallout of that presence actually means.