A whale of a time
We're back - and meeting monsters of the deep in Philip Hoare's The Sea Inside
Hi! I’m Hannah James, journalist, writer and editor, and this is where I review nature books, and think about nature-related topics out loud. Thanks for reading!
What I’m reading
I’m back - a little later than planned, but I’ve got a great one to start the reading year with.
Philip Hoare’s The Sea Inside is a wide-ranging, eccentric meditation on the connections between the sea, with all its creatures, and us land-dwellers.
“The sea defines us, connects us, separates us… And although it seems constant, it is never the same. One day the shore will be swept clean, the next covered by weed; the shingle itself rises and falls. Perpetually renewing and destroying, the sea proposes a beginning and an ending, an alternative to our landlocked state, an existence to which we are tethered when we might rather be set free.”
Hoare depicts his home town of Southampton, on Britain’s south coast, with an unsentimental attachment. He lives near “a cluster of cryptic structures”: an oil refinery, chemical plant and power station that “might be a martial Manhattan, replicating every day, sprouting out of the shore, an alternative new forest of steel”. Painters came here once - Turner and Constable - “before the refinery turned the shore spiky with petro-chemical romance.”
This is an unspectacular, unremarkable landscape… no one writes books about this shore… I just happen to live here. I didn’t choose to; it chose me.”
A theme of home and identity ripples through the book: it seems a surprising preoccupation for someone who has lived in the same house much of his life. But here it is:
“A port city relies on its relationship to elsewhere. Perhaps that’s why I like it so well, since it does not impose any identity on me. I came back here out of habit as much as choice, like the birds that migrate to and from its nondescript shores.”
This urban coastline, though, is “never not beautiful” to Hoare, as he goes for his daily swims amid fishermen and sea birds and, occasionally, seals.
“Black-headed gulls, barely more than pale smears, splash their heads and wings. Unsolved shapes drift by. Everything coalesces, caught in a dreamy, half-hallucinatory loop... Bait-diggers leave little piles by their sides like slumped sandcastles. With their buckets and spades, they might as well be burying as disinterring, these sextons of the shore. Standing over them is an outfall marker in the shape of an X, which has turned to become a cross. In the uncertain light, the mud takes on new colours, from black to taupe and even a kind of rubbed silver.”
The habits of crows and oystercatchers come under his gently curious eye, as does the theory of the ‘aquatic ape’, which posits that humans evolved to live beside the sea.
“The sea sustains and threatens us, but it is also where we came from.”
After examining the shore around Southampton, Hoare explores more distant seas. An impulsive visit to the Isle of Wight prompts a geological history and brief biographies of Julia Margaret Cameron, Thomas Merton, TH White and Tennyson, and his birdwatcher’s eye notices skylarks, ravens and wheatears. Gazing out at the sea from the clifftops, he says:
“Its open surface is pooled with shifting shafts of sunlight and mercurial upwellings. It seems to move under itself, inexorably, a great slow mass beneath a rippling skin.”
“The clouds are rushing under the sun, casting shadows on the sea, creating fluffy stealth bombers. Their shapes seem to slide under the surface as underwater islands. I’m ever more aware of the tentative land on which I stand, a white wound gouged out of England’s underbelly, studded with flint and sutured by grass.”
His writing becomes even finer when he ventures further afield, to the Azores, where he goes whale-watching. Whales are clearly Hoare’s passion (he’s previously written a book entirely dedicated to them, Leviathan or, The Whale) and it’s in describing them that he really takes flight. In noting their extraordinary hearing, he writes:
“For toothed whales blessed with pin-sharp sonar accuracy, everything is transparent; nothing is concealed. They live in another dimension, able to see into and through the solid, to discern structures inside. A whale or dolphin can see the interior of my body as accurately as I can see the exterior of hers… the world is naked to a cetacean.”
Skinned in a sleek black wetsuit, he dives with the vast creatures - not without a shimmer of fear:
“There are whales across the entirety of my vision; wall-to-wall whales wending this way and that; perpendicular, horizontal, vertical columns in the sea… These huge animals twist and turn around one another, forever touching, forever reassuring.”
“It’s stupid to be scared in such a luminous place. Their world is bright even when ours is overcast… Under the ocean’s sky, the whales’ blue world is light beyond light, just as it shades into utter darkness - the profundity where they spend most of their time.”
Whales are nomadic by nature, he says, so for them, home is other whales. Leaving his own home behind, he voyages further to Sri Lanka to see blue whales, to Tasmania to see fur seals and Shy albatross, and to New Zealand, where he notes the Maori’s close relationship with whales:
“The Polynesians’ first migrations followed those of cetaceans - what their Anglo-Saxon seafaring cousins called hwoelweg, ‘the whale’s roads’.”
“For the Maori there was no demarcation between the life of the land and that of the ocean; such distinctions made no sense. Trees and whales were as one.”
And has another dizzying, ecstatic encounter in the water, swimming with dusky dolphins:
“I’m in an eddying mass of swooping, diving cetaceans. Everywhere I look there are dolphins; I’m encircled by them. They shoot from a single source like a shower of meteorites, their two-metre bodies zipping past, in and out of focus.”
And ultimately, it’s not only in whales where he finds some sense of home, but in writing about them. Of his precious notebook, he says:
“In the absence of anything else, it is my home, my life spiral-bound between black card, the anchor I let down.”
Hoare is an enormously accomplished writer who could probably muster up entrancing words on any subject that took his fancy. But his fascination with whales means this book is beautiful and funny and enlightening and glorious. Read it!
The Sea Inside was book #10 for 2021. I finished up 2020 with:
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane (reread)
Alison Gibbs, Repentance
Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career
Alice Bishop, A Constant Hum
Alison Uttley, A Traveller in Time (reread)
James Canton, The Oak Papers
David Nash, 200 Seasons at Capel Rhiw
Sofie Laguna, The Choke
Delia Falconer, Sydney (reread)
Juliet Blaxland, The Easternmost House
And began my reading year in 2021 with:
Favel Parrett, There Was Still Love
Susan Cooper, The Dark Is Rising
Claire Tomalin, A Life of My Own
Jenny Diski, In Gratitude
TS Eliot, Four Quartets
Susan Cooper, Over Sea Under Stone
Susan Cooper, Greenwitch
Susan Cooper, The Grey King
Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God
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