The marine world has inspired much great writing, but one author, for me, is the real main man
The residents of Southend on Sea are in luck this weekend: the town is to play host to the first ever Shorelines festival ? a literature festival of the sea. Authors, including Sjon and Robert MacFarlane, are gathering to celebrate "some of the great writing across the ages that has the sea as a central theme."
I love this idea ? partly because I really like the notion of small, thematic literary festivals to counterbalance the generalist behemoths (I'd like to suggest a similar festival on the literature of mountains at the Kings House Hotel in Glen Coe to anyone listening) , but mainly because I find something deeply evocative about books based in and around the water. As well as the real-life books on the subject (I've a fatal weakness for oceanic adventure stories, Derek Lundy's heartstopping tale of the Vendee Globe, The Godforsaken Sea, being my favourite), the sea also stands as one of literature's most enduring and flexible metaphors, ably exploited by like of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch and endlessly reached for in poetry, from Homer onwards.
But for me, there's one author whose ability to capture the state and texture of water surpasses all others. When Jonathan Raban writes about the sea ? and he does so obsessively, over the course of his many books of travel-memoir ? he doesn't require it to gesture at anything, or perform any metaphoric function. For the most part, it simply is: powerful, beautiful, tranquil or treacherous; constantly changing but sufficient unto itself.
Consider this from Coasting, his solo voyage around the edge of Britain in 1986, which I'm reading at the minute. Shore-based figures come and go, but the sea is his constant companion: it shifts from "as calm and full of mercurial colour as a pool of motor oil" through "listless, with just enough wind to make the wavelets peak and dribble down their fronts", to, in the moment when a gale hits in the Solent, a violent entity "breaking out in lumps all round the boat, and rags of foam, torn off the wavetops ? heaped up in slabs and collaps[ing] on itself in a loutish show of undirected energy".
I can't get enough of Raban's writing, whether he chooses to write about Seattle (his adopted home) or Sarah Palin ? but the sea is undoubtedly his true muse. I can't think of another writer who's studied it more closely, or put more effort into conjuring it, precisely, in all its states. Can you?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jul/13/jonathan-raban-captain-seagoing-literature
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