AN OCEAN OF EMOTION
Gliding queasily in among giant jellyfish in Bantry Bay, ‘resembling elaborate puddings’
MICHAEL SIMKINS MEMOIR Rising Tide Falling Star Philip Hoare Fourth Estate €18.69
Philip Hoare is clearly obsessed by the sea and here he pens a bewitching love letter to the ocean in all its moods. Like the sea itself, it is by turns turbulent, powerful and unsettling. It also reflects and refracts his own upbringing on the English coast. He writes of drowned poets, eccentric artists and fantastical creatures of the deep; of lighthouses, whales and strange sea birds, shipwrecks and mutinies, children suckled by mythical ‘selkies’ (half seal, half man), and of submariners condemned to death in stricken vessels beneath the waves. We meet Herman Melville (author of Moby Dick), the poet Shelley, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, who grew up on Boston’s North Shore, which she described in her last-ever piece of prose as ‘the cold, running hills of the Atlantic’.
We also find Wilfred Owen, whose infant photographs show him in a sailor suit, draped over the shoulders of his father like a kitbag, the Edwardian idea of a mariner. Owen’s penchant for open-air swimming reflected both his poetic development and his sensitive, sensuous sexuality, yet in the glutinous mire of Flanders mud, water became the fetid medium in which war breeds, where instead of whales, ‘huge tanks, armoured leviathans, surfed over shell holes like scaly beasts, watched all the while by the helmeted enemy through submarine periscopes’.
In one of the most transfixing chapters Hoare visits HMS Victory, and later writes of holding the uniform that Nelson was wearing when he died: ‘a grubby, scabby rag, yet simultaneously an imprint of his genetic residue, as if at some point he might be regenerated when England needed him again’.
Hoare seamlessly interweaves his own compulsion for sea swimming alongside the historical narrative, writing of gliding queasily in among shoals of giant jellyfish in Bantry Bay, ‘resembling elaborate Victorian puddings confected by Mrs. Beeton’; and of bobbing alongside seals, ‘their puppyish heads peering with curiosity in their big black eyes’.
While wintering in Provincetown on Cape Cod, ‘a place of dark and light, day and night, storms and stars, where you have to feel alive, because it so clearly shows you the alternative’, he finds a dead dolphin on the shoreline, ‘a human in dolphin form’, and lies on the sand beside it, ‘watching the patina of decay spreading along her flanks like a silvery bloom on a plum’.
Part memoir, part travelogue, part elegy, this is an exquisite read, stuffed with dark myths and eerie legends, nourished by the author’s sublime gift for poetic description. And he saves the best for last, for in the final chapter he recounts swimming above whales off Mexico’s Pacific coast and of hearing their strange siren calls echoing through the water – ‘sounds which are audible, tangible, to other whales for hundreds, perhaps thousands of miles’. The experience, he concludes, is limitless. ‘A whale bears witness to the past and the future because it so exceeds our little lives.’