Reviewed by CP in 1987. This article may be downloaded, but may not be uploaded or printed elsewhere.
I was reading this book when the Chernobyl spring broke, and all at once this 'journey' around the North Sea oilfields took on a new dimension. It seemed simultaneously more timely and altogether less relevant.
The oil embargo of the early 1970s had what at the time appeared to be a profound effect on people's thinking: it became clear that fossil fuels weren't going to last forever ... to some it was already self-evident, but in 1974 even politicians began to see the light. While ordinary mortals queued up at the petrol pumps, Harold Wilson imposed a 50 mph speed limit, Jimmy Carter told Americans to turn down their thermostats, and the oil sheiks rubbed their hands. Fuel economy became a sexy political issue, and 'alternatives' to oil became indiscriminately attractive. Nuclear reactors were grudgingly accepted as something that would release us from the tyranny of the Gulf, and large numbers of power stations were commissioned ... particularly in Europe. What the Chernobyl accident has achieved is to remind us, probably too late, that such an accident is not just possible here, it is virtually inevitable. One can only hope, naively, that British and European evacuation procedures are more efficient than they were in the Ukraine.
Meanwhile, oil economy measures in the West compounded to a consequence unforeseen by the sheikhs: a glut appeared, followed at last by a fall in prices. Then, just as we were about to rub our hands, the experts popped up on the TV screens to warn that although a rise in prices had been bad news in 1974, a fall in prices in 1986 was even worse news. This contradiction of logic was explained by the fact that in the interim Britain had become an oil exporting nation. (They didn't explain something I have always wanted to know: why Britain never became a member of OPEC.)
For the last ten years oil has been flowing out of the North Sea bedrock, largely unwitnessed by most of us, except in the occasional television documentary or news item. Nor have we seen much result: far from becoming a nation of sheiks, Britain has exercised its talent for muddle and most of the new 'wealth' appears to have soaked into the porous rock of a crippled economy. Look how the dole queues have dwindled in the last decade; see how we no longer sell off our art treasures; look how wonderful our hospitals, schools, roads have become; look how well industry is doing. How long is it going to be before ordinary people wake up to the fact that not only haven't they felt any benefit yet, but that they never will?
All this is an obvious subject for a book, but A. Alvarez' Offshore does not deal with it, except glancingly. Billed as 'a North Sea Journey' it looks like a travel book, maps in the endpapers and all. In fact it starts out rather like a travel book, with a couple of autobiographical fragments about earlier maritime experiences. As someone who enjoys armchair travelling I looked forward to the customary sequence found in all such books, in which the SAS would train the author in survival techniques, he would equip himself with rubber dinghy, medicine chest and psalter, and set about the awkward business of hiring native bearers and guides. But as Alvarez himself says, 'a journey to the North Sea oil fields is impossible without help from one of the operating companies.' In this case the operator was Shell, and the company tour was arranged: the rest of the book is about a distinguished writer being shown around, nodding wordlessly while explanations of machinery are bellowed inaudibly against the roar of same. Maybe the treatment he received was not that of the VIP, but even so his role there was as an outsider. I kept thinking of B.S. Johnson's Trawl, another literary North Sea 'journey', more artful ... but also more authentic.
This necessarily superficial visit soon takes on all the familiar trappings of a television documentary: interviews with helicopter pilots and rig bosses, descriptions of the food in the canteens, guided tours of the sleeping accommodation, statistics and awe-inspiring facts and testaments to man's courage in the face of impossible odds, etc. There is even one of those intervals film-makers love to put in for tonal colour and padding, where the presenter rambles through scenery explaining something. Here Mr Alvarez drives a car around the Shetlands, presumably imagining himself talking over his shoulder to a camera. (Something was certainly distracting him when he drove the car into a ditch.) It has only an incidental connection with the extraordinary endeavours out there on the sixty-first parallel, but we are detached from them because our narrator wasn't being shown around that day.
Chernobyl has added a new dimension to what politicians call the energy debate. We are still going to run out of energy. Coalfields are too inefficient in a world that does not want coal, the oil reserves are finite, and increasingly expensive to exploit, and now the 'safe' alternative, the fuel of the future, has embarrassingly blown up in the faces of those who were trying to foist it upon us. I have believed for some time that as a long-term strategy we should return to a wood-burning economy, and would welcome a book by Mr Alvarez on this subject.