Tide eyed
Two excellent books take a watery look at man’s relationship with the sea
If you’ve read Moby-Dick — or, more likely, the first third — you’ll know that, like Ishmael boarding The Pequod, it isn’t quite what you signed up for. What begins as a rip-roaring yarn about an itinerant sailor setting out on a whaling voyage with a rag-tag bunch of shipmates and a mysterious captain turns quickly into something infinitely more rich and strange. It is almost as though the sea as a subject resists a linear narrative — a harpoon line running taut to an ending — in favour of a magnificent mixed-up squall.
That also seems to be the case for two new non-fiction books this month, which take on the sea only to throw up their arms in glorious defeat. The first is Shark Drunk — an excellent title if ever there was one — by Morten Strøksnes, winner of the Brage Prize in his native Norway, in which the author recounts several months in a dinghy with an artist friend trying to catch a Greenland shark. The Greenland shark is notoriously fearsome, toxic and elusive, which means that Strøksnes has a lot of time in which to contemplate the formation of the planet, the state of the Norwegian fishing industry (more interesting than it sounds) and sea-worthy folkloric legends, like that of the draugen, the ghost of a dead fisherman with a clump of seaweed where his head should be who floats in half a boat with ragged sails.
Where Strøksnes keeps his target in mind — and you won’t find out if he succeeds in catching his prey until the very last page — Philip Hoare, author of the breathtaking Leviathan, or The Whale, which won the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize, is willing to give himself up to the mercy of the currents in his new book Risingtide-fallingstar. The book is notionally broken up into profiles of figures — Virginia Woolf, David Bowie, Oscar Wilde, Wilfred Owen — whose singular lives (and in some cases, deaths) have had something distinctly watery about them. But it’s really a swirling, poetic reverie in which Hoare, a hardy swimmer, both literally and figuratively, immerses himself in his topic, opening his consciousness up to the historical flotsam and jetsam that collides against it, like Ishmael bobbing above the wreck of The Pequod. And apologies if that’s a Moby-Dick spoiler, but as with all stories, of both the literary and life kind, the ending is not the point.
— Shark Drunk by Morten Strøksnes (Jonathan Cape) and Risingtide-fallingstar by Philip Hoare (Fourth Estate) are both out on 13 July