This is a thought-provoking work, capturing the march of time which overtook the maritime world in the last quarter of the 20th century. The final crumbling of the British register caused officers like Hall to find themselves in a strange new world, sailing under flags of convenience with all the old certainties of life at sea having vanished. There is both sadness and a rage at seeing a way of life disappear forever under the wheels of commerce, made more poignant by the author himself swallowing the anchor and moving on. Expelled from Indonesia as an undesirable, medically discharged in Honolulu, confined in Nigeria, Hall's turbulent life takes him from West Africa to Japan, from Europe to the Persian Gulf to the South Pacific. At last a Master Mariner, he serves on one last break-bulk general cargo ship, before transferring to the new maritime world. The prose is as elegantly expressed as in his earlier works. Steaming along the Yemeni coast, he writes: The bleakness of the South Yemen coastline made the green sea seem sharper in contrast, almost emerald in colour.The sun sat as a bright white orb in a blue white sky, the colours scourged out by dust blown offshore from the desert interior. In a typhoon near the Macclesfield Bank: Us; wild-eyed in the wheelhouse, braced against the forward bulkhead, awaiting our fate, helpless against a show of nature's fickle anger that could take us down among the fishes before we could cry Noo-ooooo...Maturity and marriage finally see off his tendency towards alcohol abuse: I began to yearn to make myself a better person and abandon the self-serving creature I had become. Wistful, unvarnished, droll, in powerless rage against the changes, this is an important companion to Hall's previous acclaimed books, a fine work that captures, in arresting style, the life of men who go down to the sea in ships. .

Simon Hall's second book is set in the mid-1970s during the closing years of the golden age of British shipping, when cargo carriage at sea saw radical change and the romance of being at sea in old-style cargo ships came to an end. Hall's account is of five years during which he worked as a junior officer in the Far East and South Pacific. This is no ordinary memoir; the prose is vividly expressed, often shocking, sometimes elegiac as evidenced by his description of a night watch in the Indian Ocean: alone on the bridge wing in the warm tropical night, I heard the wind sing through the stays as an Aeolian harp and I felt anointed by my good fortune. His descriptions of jaunts in forgotten parts of the world are strikingly expressed and there is added poignancy from the charting of Hall's struggle against decline into alcohol abuse, expressed in a way that is in turn both sad and shocking: I ordered another cold beer and lit another cigarette, then sat with the ghost of my past dreams while the afternoon died around us and we surveyed the wreckage of all my hopes. This is an important work that captures an age now vanished, written in a style too rarely encountered.

Under a Yellow Sky paints a canvas of life aboard a Merchant Navy ship in the early 1970s. Simon, a dreamer who steps into this different world, uncovers much of the magic of the sea, although also encounters brutality, dizzying hard work and frightening bouts of violence. From the rigidity of naval college, to the debauchery of the East, this is a vivid portrait of a world now disappeared. A well-written book that will appeal to all who are interested in ships and shipping, modern and maritime history, and those who enjoy well-told traveler's tales of fascinating people and places.