Down to the sea in books
A survey of the seafaring Man Booker Prize
By Chris Cleave
For a prize that exists at the lofty pinnacle of Commonwealth and Irish literature, it is cheering to note how often the Booker can be caught sneaking down to sea level for a quick fix of brine. Since its inception in 1969 the sea has been a feisty but faithful muse in the prize’s history, with marine-themed novels taking the highest honour in almost a quarter of Booker years. Not a bad score for a habitat that, while vast, is light on the species of landbound ape that novelists so delight in chronicling.
This year’s shortlisted On Chesil Beach, artfully staged on an uncertain isthmus between the worlds of men and fishes, would make an elegant addition to the Booker’s prize-winning fleet. The first to take to the water was Stanley Middleton’s Holiday (winner, 1974), whose middle-aged protagonist returns to the seaside town where he used to holiday as a boy. The bleak coastal atmosphere is the perfect, brooding backdrop to Middleton’s tale of marginalisation and separation from the world of happy families on dry land. This use of the seaside as a place of retreat, for regrouping one’s thoughts and contemplating the ways of men, seems to return like high tide to the Booker. Iris Murdoch used it beautifully in The Sea, The Sea (winner, 1978) where her middle-aged playwright, Charles Arrowby, retires to the coast to swim, to walk, and to remember the women in his past. The idea was brought up-to-date by John Banville in The Sea (winner, 2005), in which a middle-aged protagonist returns to the seaside village where he holidayed as a boy, to remember his dead wife and his youth. A sensitive exploration in gorgeous prose, it is a measure of Banville’s effectiveness with words that he only needed half of Murdoch’s title.
In Offshore (winner, 1979) Penelope Fitzgerald delivered an intriguing variation on this theme of the world’s margin. Set on a flotilla of Battersea houseboats her novel explores the idea of a liminal psyche, of characters who belong neither on land nor at sea. Populated with humans out of their depth and fishes out of water, Fitzgerald’s is a luminous and clever microcosm of the crisis in late 20th-Century identity.
If the sea shore is the perfect literary location for exploring human boundaries, then the open ocean is the place for a novel to go if it wishes to discover what happens when those boundaries are crossed. The ocean-going ship is the literary conveyance of choice for writers who want a ready-made huis clos, a floating crucible whose crew cannot escape one another and who are subject to the most intemperate stresses of nature - from the fury of storms to the sullen lassitude of the Doldrums. Crafted by skilled shipwrights from England’s finest timber, en route between any two points in human history, and pausing only to pick up and set down useful characters from ports of the author’s choice, the ship is such a perfect vessel for fiction that it is small wonder a disproportionate number of Booker-winners are set on them.
William Golding did it first, and brilliantly, with Rites of Passage (winner, 1980), set aboard a 19th-Century Naval ship on passage to Australia. The whole of male English society is embarked for the ride - the lower ranks, the officers, the parson and the aristocrat - as they find themselves adrift between the Old and the New worlds of man. Golding’s execution was so powerful that he ruled the waves alone for a decade, during which time the Booker succumbed to the earthly pleasures of land. And what pleasures they were: this was the golden decade that opened with Salman Rushdie’s epoch-making Midnight’s Children (winner, 1981), saw winners from JM Coetzee, Kingsley Amis and Kazuo Ishiguro and then, having nothing left to prove on earth, ascended finally into the spirit world with Ben Okri’s astounding The Famished Road (winner, 1991).
It fell to Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger (winner, 1992) to return the prize to the mortal domain by taking it back out to sea. Aboard the Liverpool Merchant, a sailing ship engaged in the triangular slave trade between West Africa, the West Indies and Europe, Unsworth’s protagonist is Matthew Paris, a physician whose anti-church writings on evolution set him in interesting contrast with the Reverend Colley of Golding’s Rites of Passage. Indeed it is fascinating to read these two great ocean-going novels side-by-side, with Golding’s exploring his recurring theme of man’s reversion to savagery, while Unsworth’s circumnavigates a more utopian vision.
Following Unsworth’s triumph the Booker spent the best part of another decade in dry shoes and socks, globetrotting in some style from Ireland in Roddy Doyle’s lovely Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (winner, 1993), to the Australian bush in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (winner, 2001), via sojourns in Glasgow, Cape Town and of course, famously, Amsterdam. And then, from out of a blue sky, the Booker was blown back to sea with a story that surprised everyone, sailing off the edge of all known novelistic charts and setting a course straight for the interior of the human psyche. This novel was Life of Pi (winner, 2002), Yann Martel’s touching allegorical tale of a small boy cast adrift in a lifeboat with a full-grown Bengal tiger. The inheritor of a venerated tradition of seafaring Booker prize winners, Life of Pi infuriated some fine critics even as it captivated others, and yet strangely it is a very traditional sea story. It has all the claustrophobic determinism of the ship-bound stories of William Golding and Barry Unsworth, and yet it also evokes an idea of the sea, so beloved of the margin-walking novels of Iris Murdoch and Penelope Fitzgerald, where the ocean is a mirror in which one sees one’s life reflected. In this glass the mundane becomes mysterious, the yearnings of the heart are magnified, and the precariousness of human life is exposed.
This strange power of the sea to give insight is why the Booker, like the great novelists of an earlier epoch, returns time and again to the ocean. Back in the time when Melville or Conrad were writing, when much of the globe was still marked with a white unknown or etched with fictitious coastlines, navigators and novelists alike put to sea in order to prove something about dry land: to survey its limits, to discover more of it, to claim more of life.
This desire of novelists to sound the depths of the human heart has not changed, but perhaps the water they navigate is no longer the same ocean. The Man Booker is a prize for our modern times. In these days when the world is all discovered and few of us believe that we will imminently be colonising outer space, the sea fulfils a new office. It has become the symbol, rather than the enabling medium, of our yearning for the undiscovered. For the strange, for the beautiful, for the outlandish, we now cast our eyes towards the waves.
The search for new life, for unexplored continents in the human psyche, has always been the goal of our literature. For nearly forty years the Man Booker Prize has been at the forefront of this quest. It is still without question the prize every writer wants to win, and it doesn’t come easy. To win the Booker the writer must succeed in plunging us, head first, into the ocean of human experience. It seems unlikely, therefore, that we will see an end any time soon to novelists getting their feet wet.
Chris Cleave is a novelist. His work is included in Sea Stories - an anthology of new writing about the sea published this month by the National Maritime Museum - which also features stories by Erica Wagner, James Scudamore and Niall Griffiths among others. Chris Cleave has a website at www.chriscleave.com
