Enjoy the sea view. Don’t fall in
At the end of 2012 I started this blog. I don’t know quite what I planned to do with it at the time. The heading says “Travel, science, books Whatever I feel like, really.” Which is more or less how it’s panned out. It’s been an eclectic mess of pieces covering everything from lentil recipes to politics. (Quite a lot of politics, actually.)
At some point I saw that, strung together in the right
order, the pieces would be a review of the 20th century through its memoirs and
literature. At that point my new book, On the Rim of the Sea, began to
take shape.
The book’s title was inspired by a passage in the splendid Instead
of a Letter, by the late Diana Athill. In it she describes how, as a child,
she shocked her grandmother by talking of life as being in a bowl, floating on
the sea; provided one stayed at the bottom of the bowl, one might be serene –
but every now and then the motion of the sea flung one up the side and forced
one to a view of “dangerous, cold grey water” that would be unbearable. That,
she said, was the origin of madness. Is it? The years covered by the pieces in
this book (roughly, 1912 to the present) certainly showed us more of the sea
than we should have liked. As I write (May 2022), the cold grey water is back
with a vengeance. But it has not always been that way. This book has its darker
bits, but there were lighter times.
This book is, in part, a self-indulgence – I acknowledge
that freely; it’s the result of years spent reading books on a whim. But there
is also a purpose. The books of a time, especially its memoirs and reportage,
do hold up a mirror to a period or incident when it has long passed. I’d
strongly disagree with the critic Cyril Connolly, who wrote in The Unquiet
Grave (1944) that: '"The more books we read, the sooner we perceive
that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no
other task is of any consequence." This is, frankly, bullshit. Most
writers will not produce a masterpiece – I won’t – and we don’t always aspire to.
Rather, we provide a lens through which others can better see the world. This
is not always an art; quite often, it is just a craft.
If On the Rim of the Sea shines a light on unfamiliar
corners of the past century, I shall be happy. If its readers enjoy it, I shall
be very happy indeed.
Where to buy On the Rim of the Sea
The book is available as both an ebook and a paperback. If
you’d like to support independent bookshops (as many people do), they can order
it; you will need the ISBN number (978-0991437481).
To buy online:
Booktopia
(Australia)
