Plumbing the depths

The sea frightens me. It seems so cold and cruel, even when it looks warm and inviting. It was with some wariness, therefore, that I approached David Austin’s first novel, in which the sea, or the Sea, as it is sometimes called in this book, is a major player. Robert Radnor has returned from India ‘with a little splash of publicity’ generated through his being the only survivor of the Golden Delta, a rusty tramp steamer ‘blown round the world by the winds of whatever trade could be found’ and finally obliterated by a tidal wave. Radnor, who is already going mad and losing his life-long desire to be a sailor, has foreseen the tragedy, as he foresees others, because he and the Sea have a strange relationship — the clear calling of the title — which grants him a special intuition that survives ‘outside of the modern world with its greed for data’.