Stories
of the sea
Familiar questions? Yes. The ones most likely to get us sighing and rolling our eyes.Yet the graphic novelist Alan Moore, says this isn’t because we are frustrated or bored by the question. It is because – fundamentally - we have no idea.
I think that’s fair. Ideas, or at least, concrete ones, such as those that form a plot, or characters trait or flaw, come from nowhere we can quite identfy. Like any conscious thought, they simply appear, they are just ‘there’ and no amount of analysis of your own imagination or mind will really tell you what led to the point where they appear.
Knowing where your ideas come from is as slippery a business as ‘knowing your own mind,’ and that one keeps philosophers and psychologists pretty busy. No, we don’t know. But perhaps we know the themes. And perhaps we only know how strong a grip they have on us, when we are a long way down the track. I’ve had four books published. Storms and the sea feature very strongly in all of them. I honestly never planned it that way.
Only now can I see how my teen obsession with The Tempest has really played out, and also with a favourite poem by e e cummings
May came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.
For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea
Then…
I was young and holidaying in Cornwall. It was so wet there was
nothing to do but stare at the stormy ocean through a rain-streaked window.
From the dusty sheIves I plucked an ancient paperback, Clare Francis’s Come Hell or High Water, the story of
her solo sail across the Atlantic.
I read on… and on, feeling the cold wind and fierce spray, gasping,
sea-sick and with my heart in my mouth, as page after page she faced 60ft waves
and ferocious storms.
I’ve been hooked on tales of ocean adventure ever since. From Robinson Crusoe to Life of Pi, via Moby Dick
and Lord of the Flies, I’m
transported by stories of the blue. Now, if I’m not in the water or on it,
reading or writing about it, there’s a part of me that feels not quite
complete.
The sea, you won’t be surprised to hear, is a huge part of my latest: Girl. Boy. Sea.(Zephyr, August). It is
not just where the adventure takes
place, it is an important character in its own right.
As someone who works in ocean conservation (www.whales.org) and as a member of @authors4oceans, I wanted
to explore the ethical issues around the sea. A strong theme of the book is why
the ocean matters and what we are in
danger of losing.
The sea is stranger than any planet we can imagine, full of beings
too alien to be real. A wilderness that is unlike the land, where we’ve lost
nature, have tamed it. With too many factories and roads, and too few trees. There’s
no deep forest to hide our darkest dreams or monsters; to feed new fairy
stories.
But the sea does have
that wildness still. It can’t be tamed. You can’t plough it, fence it or build
on it.
Or is that just a fantasy? Because we can still drill the seabed,
fill the water with plastic, ravage fishstocks, upset the chemical balance of
the 7/10 of the surface that gives us 50% of our breath and regulates
atmospheric carbon.
I wanted Girl. Boy. Sea to
be set in a pristine ocean world. It is about what we are losing but still have
time to save.
The MCs, Bill and Aya’s survival depends on the sea, but like the
dark forest of a fairy tale, it’s a thing of terror as much as beauty; that
gives life and snatches it away in an instant. On their odyssey they encounter
whales, turtles, and a gull who becomes their friend. But they are threatened
by storms, and a dark shadow, lurking in the deep, that follows, getting closer
day by day.
The sea puts Bill and Aya – who are as unlike each other as two
characters ever were – through trials of fear and starvation. To survive, they
have to work together, and in so doing, discover who they really are and what
they have in common. It’s an experience that binds them, showing their power
and vulnerability.
Like e e cummings poem, Girl.
Boy. Sea. is about what we lose and what we find in the sea.
4 comments:
It sounds fascinating, and that's a beautiful cover. Will send for it forthwith!
Thank you, Sue :)
And actually, you've inspired me to think: I'll write about covers ina future blog.
Never judge a book by its cover. But we do precisely that in some ways.
I love your explanation of how the sea came to be a key theme in your life and that your books are tightly meshed with the path you have chosen (or perhaps the path that has chosen you). I'm so looking forward to reading this one.
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