Getting under the ocean’s skin
Author and broadcaster Philip Hoare is coming to New Zealand to share his love of the sea and its creatures. Warren Gamble reports.
It’s 6am in the British city of Southampton when Philip Hoare answers his phone. He is surprisingly cheerful, more so because he has already been up for three hours.
He’s been writing, he says, as if it’s perfectly natural. He’s also waiting for the tide to come back in so he can head down to the Solent – the stretch of water separating the south coast of England from the Isle of Wight – for his daily dip.
‘‘There’s something almost subversive about occupying this part of the day that’s not really occupied by human beings,’’ he says. ‘‘When I go down to the beach, I see rabbits and deer, and seals. The human world can’t get at you at this time.’’
The sea, swimming in it, marvelling at it and writing about it has been much of Hoare’s life for the last 20 years. His acclaimed, loose trilogy of books Leviathan,
Or The Whale (2008), The Sea Inside (2013) and last year’s Rising Tide Falling Star have taken him around the world to some extraordinary environments.
They include New Zealand, where he will return this year as a speaker for this month’s WORD Christchurch festival, and to give a lecture in Nelson as a guest of the Cawthron Institute on September 3.
Hoare’s life wasn’t always so regulated by the tides or by writing. Inspired by David Bowie, music was his first love. In the 1980s, he managed bands, was a record buyer for Virgin, and headed British operations for a European label. He laughs at the idea that his current writing self would be getting up at the time his punk self would be getting home from a club.
He didn’t learn to swim until his 20s, and says his view of the sea was of a ‘‘compulsive but also repulsive place’’.
‘‘I managed to break that membrane by putting my face through (the surface) and seeing it wasn’t a dark, harsh place full of sea serpents and eels.’’
The Ocean’s Skin is the title of one of Hoare’s talks – from a quote by Herman Melville, the author of Moby-Dick. His fascination with the 1851 classic whaling novel has seen him curate a free online international reading of it by stars such as Sir David Attenborough, Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen Fry and Witi Ihimaera.
The Melville quote is: ‘‘When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it.’’
It goes to the mystery of the sea that has drawn Hoare in; first as a swimmer, then as a writer.
It also goes to his fascination with whales and dolphins, which began with a sorry encounter with an orca at a safari park outside London. ‘‘The notion that you could take one of the most beautiful animals and put it into an overgrown swimming pool and train it to jump through hoops – that really messed with me.’’
Since then, he has seen wild humpback whales leaping out of the water at Cape Cod, and swum with blue whales off Sri Lanka and sperm whales in the Azores – ‘‘when they look you in the eye, it’s incredibly humbling’’. His passion is palpable, even in the early morning on a phone 18,000km away. He is already excited at the prospect of giving a talk on a whale-watching boat off Kaikoura when he visits. ‘‘My voice goes up about three octaves when I start talking about whales.’’
On an earlier visit to our waters, he swam with a super-pod of 200 dusky dolphins, an episode he has written about with wonder.
‘‘The sleek cetacean torpedoes were zipping all around, and at one moment, I turned to face two dozen of them charging directly at me. I thought I was about to be run down. But these animals can detect an object the thinness of a human fingernail at 20 yards. Effortlessly, they turned and swooped between my legs and under my arms.’’
He found out later that many were having sex around him.
Hoare’s books are as hard to pin down as the ocean itself, with their mix of science, travel, literary history and personal stories. In
Rising Tide Falling Star , he traverses everything from the death of Bowie, to Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and living in a seaside house near the whaling grounds of Massachusetts.
The sea ebbs and flows through it all. Is he hopeful for it and its magnificent creatures, given the threats of climate change and the way we treat it as a dumping ground for plastics and other pollution?
He tries to be, he says, although he is worried that Trump’s America threatens environmental progress. Agreements like the international whaling moratorium, while still voluntary, have helped to revive some whale populations and show that ‘‘we can still do good things’’.
But he worries that countries like Britain have lost their connection to the sea; turned their backs on it.
New Zealand, he says, has a much healthier orientation to the water, especially through Ma¯ ori history, tradition and culture. The Ma¯ ori connection to whales dates from the ancient voyages of ancestors following whale migration paths, and there are many more words for whale in Ma¯ ori than in English.
Hoare has even written about the New Zealand link to Moby-Dick through the elaborately tattooed visage of Maori chief Te Pe¯ hi Kupe.
Kupe visited England and was presented to King George IV in 1824, before becoming the inspiration for the ‘‘South Seas’’ harpooner Queequeg in Melville’s novel.
The white whale continues to beguile Hoare. One of his WORD Christchurch appearances will feature a reading workshop on the novel. Among the questions he explores are parallels between Ahab’s vengeful quest and the war on terror, and whether there is an evil monster lurking in the deep or whether there is ‘‘one evil animal on this planet, and it’s not the whale’’.
The waters will still be a bit chilly when Hoare visits but he will find time to swim. Right now, he is immersed in his next project.