Carried Away

There are different people in life. There are those that love the idea of travelling to a remote Indonesian island with three friends and surfing huge waves, and those that think this is a barmy idea and would rather go on a nice city break or read a book by the pool. What you do not always get is a trepidatious mentality in an adventurous body. Where is my passport, does that girl like me, should I avoid surfing in shark invested waters? Cole is a walking contradiction, but will the harrowing events of Carried Away by T J Derry allow him to focus on who he really is?

Cole is in his mid-30s and has a restless soul, is the 9-5 life really what he wants? He lives for his lads’ holidays where he and a group of old friends travel to exotic locations to surf the most bodacious waves. This latest may be the greatest trip yet, a luxury island, huge surf and a woman Cole falls for instantly, but is this paradise found or paradise lost? When out on one surf trip the water becomes unnaturally still, before them they see a giant wave – a tsunami. Will Cole and his friends survive?

Carried opens up on the start of the tsunami scene…. and then quickly flashes back for 200 pages for the build up to the events. This feels strange, but once you read a hundred or so pages of character development, you understand why Derry did this. The tsunami carrot needs to be dangled in front of the reader lest they think this is a relationship drama.

A good disaster movie develops its characters first before picking them off and Derry is attempting this, but it does feel like a romance novel at times. Cole is such a contradiction; a six foot plus surfer who is also shy and nervous. I can understand this in a teen, but in a 35-year-old man, I would think that he should have matured more. Carried feels like the oldest coming of age story I have read, but people do develop at different paces.

The enigma that is Cole is compounded in the second half of the book, which is the stronger disaster section. He is forced to step up and all of a sudden, he is mature, intelligent and resourceful. Have events forced him to step up? I am not sure. I think that he was like this all the time and his softer, emotional side was written slightly too young. The novel comes with QR codes that you can scan to read some of Cole’s journal online – these reads at times more like a teenager than a full-grown man.

Having such a paradoxical character at the centre of Carried actually worked as it made me engage with what was happening, why is Cole like this, what on Earth is he doing now? Some will find him coy and romantic, others an irritant. I liked him most when the seaweed hit the fan and he needed to focus to save himself and his friends.

Carried is a tale of two parts: beach story and tsunami story. Derry is aware of some of the influences and contradictions in the book, having chapter titles that reference Alex Garland’s The Beach, or Cole’s complex nature. Having flawed characters are fun in a book, if written that way by accident or on purpose. As a reader I enjoy trying to figure out what makes them tick, even if it makes no sense. Cole may be a 35-year-old man child, but he steps up in part two for a very enjoyable action thriller in which survival is not a given.