Not another Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Rescue Ferrets At Sea
Book 1 of The Ferret Chronicles
Written and Illustrated
by Richard Bach
Scribner, 2002
138 pages
Available at Goodwill Bookstore

You can be anything you want to be, my Betha-Nikka," she said, "if only you love enough." She kissed her two kids, turned out the light.

From the small stone house, in the highlands near the roof of the world, philosopher ferrets had learned the same and called it wisdom: we find our happiness only when we follow what we most love in all the world.

These words, found at the end of chapter one of Rescue Ferrets at Sea, indicate where author Richard Bach, best known for the bestsellers Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah, wants this novel to go.

A master of his own brand of fable, Bach has always managed to weave his complex beliefs on human potential into interesting, easily understandable tales. Jonathan Livingston Seagull, for instance, is about a seagull who struggles to achieve flight perfection in the many lifetimes it takes him to do it. Illusions, on the other hand, shows Bach’s conviction that we are our own messiah in a story of a barnstormer-slash-airplane-mechanic who is able to perform miracles.

Rescue Ferrets at Sea, the first in the five-series The Ferret Chronicles, is yet another book that is classic Bach. An inspirational action fable that’s as simple as a children’s story (it is my belief that Bach maintains his own genre), it relays a message of spiritual empowerment, the fulfillment that can be had from a relentless pursuit of ideals, and the value of teamwork. It also paints a rousing portrait of those who choose to put their lives on the line so that others may live.

The book’s heroine is Captain Bethany Ferret (Betha-Nikka to her mom) whose dream it was to join the Ferret Rescue Service (FRS) ever since she heard her first rescue ferret story. The FRS, the animal kingdom’s answer to our Coast Guard, holds itself responsible for the safety of all non-humans (often mice, rats, cats and the occasional hamster left behind by human crews of sinking ships) at sea. Bethany’s adventures with the FRS, at the helm of the rescue ship Resolute, reveals to readers a barrage of insights about heroism, solid devotion to an ideal, perseverance and the satisfaction of a job well done – lessons humans were meant to identify with.

Rescue Ferrets at Sea is easily unforgettable, what with its high-flying adventures (in one mission, where over a hundred animals and data that would save the future of the ocean, were saved, Resolute almost smashes into the wreck that is the giant ship Deepsea Explorer); memorable characters (like Miss Chloe, the beautiful rock-star-slash-reporter who joins the crew to write about the FRS); and quotable quotes (the chapter on the Deepsea Explorer mission has Bethany and Chloe in a near-death situation, and in that moment, for Bethany, "Nothing else mattered. Not the data, not the storm, not their adventure on this minor planet of a minor sun in a minor galaxy of stars flung across space and time. Everything was just as it should be. She was about to give her life that others would live, and it was proper that she should.").

Unforgettable though this story is, it is no Jonathan Livingston Seagull. For starters, it contains too many characters and ideas, interesting though they may all be, for its 138 pages to fully thresh out. While the story is equally, if not more, interesting in terms of adventure, there is a hodgepodge of Bach’s beliefs on love, beauty and human lifetimes in this book that first time Bach readers would most likely find jarring. Nevertheless, it still makes for a good read. – Althea Lauren Ricardo