Free The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe

reading a few of the Sunday Times reports, I had concluded for myself that the strongest contender was a French yachtsman called Bernard Moitessier. He was a fabulous seaman – lean, sinewy, and totally dedicated to the life of the lone explorer. He had already sailed his 39-foot boat Joshua through the fearsome waters of the Southern Ocean and round Cape Horn, encountering (and surviving) terrifying storms in the process. It appeared that he was reluctant to enter the race, but under its rules, he had no choice: the Sunday Times had cleverly arranged things so that any sailor who set off round the world between June and October was a contender for the prize, whether they wanted it or not. I pinned my colours to Moitessier and even persuaded my parents to buy me an expensive hardback copy of his book, Sailing to the Reefs , for my eighth birthday. The writing was rather too dense and poetic for me to enjoy, but I pored for hours over the black-and-white photographs of the muscular Moitessier powering his boat through the waves and swinging effortlessly from rope to rope amid the rigging of his yacht like a nautical Tarzan.
    The other entrants to the race, announced one by one, failed to capture my imagination in the same way. There was Robin Knox-Johnston, a twenty-eight-year-old English merchant marine officer; Chay Blyth, a former army sergeant, one year his junior; Donald Crowhurst, aged thirty-six, a British engineer and manager of an electronics company; Nigel Tetley, a Royal Navy lieutenant commander, and four others. None of them seemed in Moitessier’s league. One or two of them, from what I could gather, had barely been to sea before. But then something happened to change my mind, and my allegiance. My father came in from work one day with a copy of the Teignmouth Post and Gazette and showed me the front-page story – which announced, amazingly, that one of the entrants to the race, Donald Crowhurst, had now decided not just that he was going to set sail from Teignmouth, but that he had even agreed to name his yacht Teignmouth Electron . (In return, as it later emerged, for a number of local sponsorship deals.)
    The name of the man who had persuaded Crowhurst to bestow these benefits on a town with which he otherwise had no connection was Rodney Hallworth: a one-time Fleet Street crime reporter, now Devon-based press agent and assiduous promoter of anything and everything that might raise the profile of Teignmouth in the eyes of the wider world. From the stories which he now began to feed to the local and national newspapers, I began to build up an image in my mind of Donald Crowhurst as a kind of yachting superhero: the dark horse of the race, and therefore its most intriguing and alluring competitor. Not only was he an accomplished seaman, apparently, he was an electronics wizard, and a designer of genius, who despite making a late entrance into the race was going to snatch it from under the noses of his rivals by setting sail in a sleek, modern, radically innovative vehicle which had been built to his own specifications – a trimaran, no less, with a unique self-righting system which would activate in case of a capsize, and which was controlled (here was the clincher – the word which, in 1968, set everybody’s pulse racing) by a computer .
    Instantly, Donald Crowhurst became the focus of all my interest and admiration. He was due to arrive in Teignmouth in only a matter of weeks – and I, for one, couldn’t wait.
    A support committee had now been formed, and one of my father’s sailing friends was a keen member. In this way we were drip-fed pieces of information. Crowhurst’s boat was finished, we were told, and he was already sailing it from a boatyard in Norfolk round to the Devon coast. He would be with us in a matter of days. As it turned out, this forecast was optimistic. Teething troubles dogged that maiden voyage, which took four times as long as it should have done, and it was mid-October by the