NATURAL HISTORY & MEMOIRS 33
TLS SEPTEMBER 1 2017
Relating a swim at Cape Cod, PhilipHoare observes: “every swim is a littledeath. But it’s also a reminder that you
are alive”. The possibility of death ghosts thepages of RisingTideFallingStar, which openswith The Tempest – Hoare relates the etymolog-ical connection between “tempest” and theLatin tempus (time) – and finishes with the lossof David Bowie. In one startling passage, Hoareimagines himself in the jaws of a shark. Inanother, he gives a haunting account of what itmust be like to drown; the human brain doesn’tgive the command to breathe in until it hasalmost lost consciousness.
This focus on the mortal offsets the raptureinherent in so much of Hoare’s prose, hisunflinching celebration of landscape. He ispoetic and precise. An avocet is a “piece ofnetsuke”. Jellyfish are “cloudy as cataracts”beneath the “ocean’s skin”. Journals aredescribed as exhibiting “a parade of longings”.He lavishes as much attention on the macabreas he does on things that seem conventionallybeautiful. His description of finding a deer’scarcass on a beach (“this sea-deer, this antleredseal”) is pure Ted Hughes:
It was down to its essential scaffolding, its skele-tal beauty twisted like the ghost of a horned sea
FallingStar seems to combine both approaches,knowledge and literary biography woventhrough with experience. The links between thedifferent worlds and historical figures Hoareinvokes are image-led: in one chapter, we’retransported from one domain to another by avision of Icarus falling from the sky. ElizabethBarrett Browning, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath,Percy Shelley and Lord Byron all stand in rela-tion to the sea, as does the presiding spirit ofLeviathan, Herman Melville. Hoare exploresthe sea as a character in Virginia Woolf’s work,and his approach to literary history makes itsomething more than a character in his ownwriting: an urgent narrator, perhaps. There’s aparticularly evocative reimagining of Owen’slast swim:
I watch him as he leaves his uniform neatly foldedin a pile, striding into the sea on his short legs,feeling its rising, exhilarating chill pushingthrough the waves, the water slicking back hisshort hair, as sleek as a selfie. I follow him intothe surf . . .
The effect is to make literary figures unerringlyhuman; the personal and the historical inter-twine in Hoare’s attempt to appreciate the scaleof the sea.
In his editorial for Granta’s New Nature Writ-
HELEN MORT
serpent lolling in the water. The stubby antlerssprouted from the bulbous, rough-edged ringson the forehead; caught between them was a scrapof fetlock-like fur . . .Wrestling with the carcass to take it home, he
writes, “it occurred to me how easy it might beto detach a human head”. There’s a refreshinghonesty in the thoughts Hoare is willing toadmit to, and it creates a sense of complicity inthe reader. As he swims, Hoare is always awareof danger, mindful of the sea’s intransigence.Describing the plight of many Irish migrantsin the mid-1800s who drowned “in sceneswhich might have been painted by Turner orfilmed by CNN”, he reflects: “the sea does notcare. It never did”.
While Hoare’s Leviathan (2008) was illumi-nating in its historical range, The Sea Inside(2013) offered a more personal account of thehuman relationship with oceans. RisingTide-
P h i l i p H o a r e
R I S I N G T I D E F A L L I N G S T A R416pp. Fourth Estate. £16.99.
978 0 00813 366 5
Beneath the ocean’s skinHow a writer learnt to think through – and with – the sea
ing (2008), Jason Cowley cited Lydia Peelle:“The new nature writing,” she told me, “ratherthan being pastoral or descriptive or simply a nat-ural history essay, has got to be couched in stories– whether fiction or non-fiction – where we ashumans are present. Not only as observers, butas intrinsic elements.”
In RisingTideFallingStar, the writer is alwaysan intrinsic element in the landscape, butHoare avoids the traps of anthropocentrism.Discussing whale song and its possible mean-ing, he notes wryly: “we cannot comprehendsuch beauty beyond ourselves; we must burdenit with other meaning”. There has been muchspeculation about the function of whalesong:whether it’s a mating call, a form of “remoteforeplay”, a sonar to detect other whales.Perhaps whales just sing for themselves.
The result of Hoare’s self-aware approach towhat we like to call “nature writing” is a richportrait of the sea as an imaginative landscape.Other geographical canvases don’t hold thesame attraction for him (“mountains scare me.They make me think they’re hiding some-thing”). The late Roy Fisher said of his home-town, “Birmingham is what I think with”.Philip Hoare thinks through – and with – the seauntil he seems almost at one with it.
