The image haunted Gresham for years, supplying Nightmare Alley with its opening scene and inspiring the rest of the book, a violent and disturbing voyage through tarot, mind reading, carnival life, psychoanalysis and spiritualism, as cold reader Stan Carlisle graduates from sideshows to fake religion, seeking wealth.
Instead this is a thoughtful, personal account of a single voyage through a violent region that does not pretend to have the answers or even a political ax to grind.
David Phipps-Davis (Mr Bumble) has a fine operatic baritone whilst that night's Oliver, Jack Skilbeck-Dunn, produced a heart-rending and suitably angelic tourist voyaging through the seamy and violent underside of Victorian society.
On this warm Saturday morning — Day 2 of our maiden voyage as sailors, as it were — a sudden violent gust had spun off a passing squall and abruptly interrupted our heretofore pleasant idyll.
Orion also passed a test on April 17 that subjected the vessel to intense shaking, mimicking the violent motions it will experience during the beginning and ending of its space voyage.
On one expedition she set out chasing a tip that there was a single field of 1,000 jars: "Abominable voyage, on tracks that often followed the summits, hardly trodden... frequent violent storms," she wrote.
Jeebleh, now a university professor in New York with an American wife and two daughters, expects that his voyage will reinforce the great divide between his new life and the violent inhabitants of the "city of death".
The initial shock of alienation is followed by a slow, halting, uncertain progress toward a new experience and acceptance of the physical world, which presses in with all the prickly materiality of Rossellini's neorealist training (and even long passages of outright documentary, like the violent fishing expedition in "Stromboli" or the guided tours through Naples and Pompeii in "Voyage").
||| [3] ||| [3.1] Witnesses claim || [3.2] the ferry's Thai captain ignored warnings [[[against trying to press ahead through a violent storm || after leaving the mainland town of Surat Thani late on Tuesday night for the seven-hour voyage]]].
