Remarkable tour of world’s oceans
Book offers a museum of extraordinary humanity and animal curiosities
The Sea Inside
If, like me, you feel you have lately read, heard and endured on television more than enough about Nature, you may be discouraged by the first few pages of this extraordinary work.
Almost at once in them, almost at dawn, a blackbird “paces out the garage roof,” and tadpoles “swim blindly in a slowly leaking pool.” A woodpecker hammers in a wood somewhere. Geese fly low.
As the world wakes, the author, having ridden his bicycle to a nearby beach, plunges into the water while curlews whistle “through their arched bills” and an “indignant” duck is flushed from a pond. “The dawn is replaced by ordinary day; the emptiness is soon filled by the commonplace.”
But no, The Sea Inside is not just another in the long line of succession to Thoreau. It is really a grand cabinet of natural curiosities in the robust tradition of old Thomas Browne, or even a random anthology of convictions like Montaigne’s. It is no Walden Pond that Hoare first plunges into, but the Solent near the “arse-end of Southampton.”
Cheer up, then. The book is divided into nine parts, each vestigially concerned with a different part of the world’s universal ocean, and loosely linked by the association between humankind and all the other beasts.
The range, variety and enthusiasm of the whole performance more than makes up for any high-flown lapses, and elevates the work into the realm of sheer entertainment.
The pace is exhilarating. The learning is profound. The surprises are tumultuous and the simple love of nature, in all its forms and without capital letters, is a delight.
Tucked away in the several narratives are a number of more or less relevant obituaries, meticulously managed.
Their subjects range from the New-Zealand-American TrappistZen poet-philosopher Thomas Merton (died 1968), an irrepressible opponent of all the world’s corrosions, to the charming Northumberland anchorite St. Cuthbert (died 687), whose cold feet were warmed by the breath of otters, whose Psalter was rescued from sea immersion by a seal, and who made lasting friends with ravens and eider ducks.
Here lies poor old Truganini (died 1876), the very last of the original Tasmanians whose final remnants of hair and skin were returned from Oxford to her homeland only in 2002.
Here is the Scottish anatomist John Hunter (died 1793). Around his London house leopards and jackals lived, eagles were chained to rocks, zebras, ostriches and giraffes roamed the lawns, and when he died, so Hoare tells us, it was from a fit of angina probably induced by the syphilis he had experimentally given himself.
Who was Valentina Orlikova (died 1986)? She was a Soviet heroine, a whaling captain who contributed, during 40 years of Antarctic hunting, to the killing of 338,336 whales.
And if The Sea Inside offers us a scattered gallery of extraordinary humanity, it is a positive museum of animal peculiarity, affectionately defined. Who would ever have guessed that the albatross has a powerful sense of smell? Or that baby Hector’s dolphins are hardly bigger than rugby balls, and have dorsal fins “like the handles on Continental coffee cups?”
Crows can be taught to talk as fluently as parrots. At the tip of the oystercatcher’s bill are corpuscles enabling it to feed itself by touch as well as by sight — it can forage by night and day. Cormorants were once called eel-crows; wheatears were formerly white-arses. The extinct marsupial called the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine, may not be extinct after all.
Hoare loves them all, but it is whales of all sorts that he loves the most, the mammals who come nearest to expressing, I suppose, some mystical alliance between the species. Hoare made his name with his famous study Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), and his infatuation with the animal dominates this work, too.
He watches, searches for, swims with, is clustered among cetaceans in waters from one end of our ocean to the other. And his intimate contacts with them do provide a kind of fugitive theme for The Sea Inside, besides giving the book moments of genuine physical excitement. Not many people, after all, have gone swimming among a pod of 200 dolphins.
It is a remarkable book, full of arcane interest and good writing, but perhaps it would be better without some of the whales. The thread that links its several concerns is at once too weak and too insistent, making its parts stronger than its whole.
Better a whole-hog miscellany than a contrived unity, and Hoare’s gifts, like Montaigne’s, do not always need discipline or symmetry — their profligacy can be their strength.
He ends the work with a return to Nature-writing mode — that blackbird on the garage roof again, out on the bicycle at dawn, ringing Brent geese on the shore, allegorically clearing out the room from which, six years ago, his mother left to die in hospital.
The Sea Inside concludes with the words: “There’s no such thing as home, and we live there, you and me.” For my money, they are the most sententious and least meaningful words in a book full of grand truths.