SECRETS OF THE SEA
Registered by auroraborealis9 of Lillestrøm, Akershus fylke Norway on 6/2/2012
This book is in a Controlled Release!
This book is in a Controlled Release!
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Secrets of the Sea
by Nicholas Shakespeare
402pp, Harvill Secker, £12.99
It is said that Tasmania is the furthest place a European can travel - if you keep going any further you're on the way back. Nicholas Shakespeare arrived there seeking respite after the publication of his acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin, having singled out the island as the one place Chatwin had never been. He quite soon found an entire village of Chatwins and, even more intriguingly, a family of Shakespeares, through whom he was able to trace his ancestry to a buccaneering 18th-century colonist who became known as the Father of Tasmania.
The genealogical link gives Shakespeare a deep affinity for the island, which he described in his travelogue In Tasmania as being "like outer space on earth, evoked to stand for all that is far-flung, strange and unverifiable". That book won the 2007 Tasmania Book Prize - a niche accolade, though it would be hard to imagine a more eloquent expression of a man falling head over heels for the last place on earth.
In Tasmania is followed by a novel set in the south-east of the island he has made his home. Wellington Point is a coastal town "with one road in and one road out that on warm days smelled of blueberry muffins and chemist's scent and tractor exhaust". It is here Alex Dove returns from England after his parents die in a car accident, to find he has inherited a large, unprofitable farm and a dusty collection of ships in bottles. The loneliness is palpable: "When Alex walked out along the jetty, he was aware of being at the end of the line. With a keener pang than normal it struck him - surveying the horizon - that he really did live in one of the earth's more remote places."
Then he meets Merridy, who harbours a tragedy of her own. Merridy's brother disappeared as a child and her parents have never entirely recovered. Now she has broken off her studies in Melbourne to look after her elderly father, and is increasingly drawn to Alex, whose sadness beguiles her: "At first Alex had merely intrigued her. Then she heard about what had happened to his parents. The effect was galvanic. She could not help but be attracted to a quality in him to which she responded in spite of herself; his candour and also his loss ... It was an odd characteristic, unusually intense in both of them, that each would be drawn to a commensurate tragedy in the other."
They marry, but after their initial passion fails to produce a child, their lives begin to drift. Alex tinkers with his bottled ships and deals with outbreaks of "dribbly eye in the roos"; Merridy wonders whether she would have been better continuing her studies. Financial desperation forces her to establish a sideline in oyster-farming, for which she discovers she has a gift. The couple's torpor is disturbed by a storm, during which Alex rescues a teenage sailor dressed in 18th-century costume, as if a deposit from the island's colonial history has washed into their lives.
Kish, as he is called, is part of a semi-literate crew of young offenders serving on a replica brigantine as part of a rehabilitation programme. Though the young delinquent seems truculent and disturbed, the couple take him into their home, which allows Alex to "indulge the extravagant idea that he had plucked from the sea a child he never had", while Merridy finds him reminiscent of her lost brother. Tongues begin to wag about Merridy's relationship with the foundling, and the malicious rumours become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
by Nicholas Shakespeare
402pp, Harvill Secker, £12.99
It is said that Tasmania is the furthest place a European can travel - if you keep going any further you're on the way back. Nicholas Shakespeare arrived there seeking respite after the publication of his acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin, having singled out the island as the one place Chatwin had never been. He quite soon found an entire village of Chatwins and, even more intriguingly, a family of Shakespeares, through whom he was able to trace his ancestry to a buccaneering 18th-century colonist who became known as the Father of Tasmania.
The genealogical link gives Shakespeare a deep affinity for the island, which he described in his travelogue In Tasmania as being "like outer space on earth, evoked to stand for all that is far-flung, strange and unverifiable". That book won the 2007 Tasmania Book Prize - a niche accolade, though it would be hard to imagine a more eloquent expression of a man falling head over heels for the last place on earth.
In Tasmania is followed by a novel set in the south-east of the island he has made his home. Wellington Point is a coastal town "with one road in and one road out that on warm days smelled of blueberry muffins and chemist's scent and tractor exhaust". It is here Alex Dove returns from England after his parents die in a car accident, to find he has inherited a large, unprofitable farm and a dusty collection of ships in bottles. The loneliness is palpable: "When Alex walked out along the jetty, he was aware of being at the end of the line. With a keener pang than normal it struck him - surveying the horizon - that he really did live in one of the earth's more remote places."
Then he meets Merridy, who harbours a tragedy of her own. Merridy's brother disappeared as a child and her parents have never entirely recovered. Now she has broken off her studies in Melbourne to look after her elderly father, and is increasingly drawn to Alex, whose sadness beguiles her: "At first Alex had merely intrigued her. Then she heard about what had happened to his parents. The effect was galvanic. She could not help but be attracted to a quality in him to which she responded in spite of herself; his candour and also his loss ... It was an odd characteristic, unusually intense in both of them, that each would be drawn to a commensurate tragedy in the other."
They marry, but after their initial passion fails to produce a child, their lives begin to drift. Alex tinkers with his bottled ships and deals with outbreaks of "dribbly eye in the roos"; Merridy wonders whether she would have been better continuing her studies. Financial desperation forces her to establish a sideline in oyster-farming, for which she discovers she has a gift. The couple's torpor is disturbed by a storm, during which Alex rescues a teenage sailor dressed in 18th-century costume, as if a deposit from the island's colonial history has washed into their lives.
Kish, as he is called, is part of a semi-literate crew of young offenders serving on a replica brigantine as part of a rehabilitation programme. Though the young delinquent seems truculent and disturbed, the couple take him into their home, which allows Alex to "indulge the extravagant idea that he had plucked from the sea a child he never had", while Merridy finds him reminiscent of her lost brother. Tongues begin to wag about Merridy's relationship with the foundling, and the malicious rumours become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
God tur
