Sea Stories

by Desmond Barry, Chris Cleave Margaret Elphinstone Niall Griffiths Tessa Hadley Roger Hubank Charles Lambert (Goodreads author) Sam Llewellyn more...

book data

7 ratings, 4.29 average rating, 1 review (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		71%
4		14%
3		0%
2		0%
1		14%

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published

September 27th 2007 by National Maritime Museum (UK)

binding

Paperback, 320 pages

isbn

094806580X (isbn13: 9780948065804)

description

To mark the 70th anniversary of the opening of the National Maritime Museum, we have brought together this collection of short stories inspired by a g...more

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07/08/08

Abailart rated it:

Read in September, 2008

Sea Stories, National Maritime Museum, London, 2007

This is a wonderful collection of short stories by contemporary writers. I’d delved in first as relief from ‘demanding literature’, I was freighted with deep emotional attachments to the sea yarns of old childhood, expecting perhaps the adventures of a cast of rugged seafarers tossed upon tumult and enduring against tempest and shipwreck. Well, there is some of that thick imagery of the sea in full fury, and superbly written to...more Sea Stories, National Maritime Museum, London, 2007

This is a wonderful collection of short stories by contemporary writers. I’d delved in first as relief from ‘demanding literature’, I was freighted with deep emotional attachments to the sea yarns of old childhood, expecting perhaps the adventures of a cast of rugged seafarers tossed upon tumult and enduring against tempest and shipwreck. Well, there is some of that thick imagery of the sea in full fury, and superbly written too, yet what the stories together show is that ‘sea’ is deeper and wilder and more endless than our museum of memories and ideas can contain. The last story in the collection, ‘The Museum of the Sea” makes this point lightly and humorously, the more so given the collection celebrates the National Maritime Museum.
Each story really deserves praise and its own review. I was struck by the fact that although a story about the sea may invite, from this reader at least, a preliminary expectation of the primacy of swirling imagery, each story here is marked by precise control of the short story form. The ‘art’ refreshes while the ‘content’ disturbs, the old shared symbolisms of sea unravel certainties.
There is a wonderful range of treatments, all delighted me. Perhaps if there is anything that unites them it is less the sea or our conceptions of the sea and more the ‘seas’ of faith and trust and love and loss, betrayal, the tumults and storms of our lives, our experience of being humans with explicit conscience and intention, yet tumbled in circumstance, making passages from no return. And perhaps too these stories even when obliquely are about reading and writing too, these as structures of lives which are stories “which begin inside another, older story, and around all the stories, circled the imprisoning sea.” One of the dour, near ancient wisdoms of the sea-philosopher: “It is not possible to control events at sea. What else are the old songs and stories but ways of teaching what we need to know?” (both quotations from ‘The Island’ by Roger Hubank).
I hope that does not sound too pretentious, for most of all this is a wonderful and rich collection that will give a great deal of pleasure.
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