‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays called The Sea Inside and now RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR together make a loose, meditative trilogy on people, the ocean, its inhabitants, its threats and delights, the comings and goings, the whole tidal business, its excitements and its ever-present grip on our minds and imaginations. The sea ‘deals life and death for innocent and guilty alike’, he says, and that all-pervasiveness is both his subject and his method.
The rather exciting slidtogether words of this title (and of all his chapter titles) give a hint of what the book is about. This is not the sea in any historical, scientific or practical sense. It is much more embedded in a kind of marine ambivalence than that, with a lolling, lapping, almost somnolent rhythm to it, gathered into chapters called ‘HEGAZESTOTHESHORE’, ‘ZEROANDEVERYTHINGTOGETHER’, ‘THESTARLIKESORROWSOFIMMORTALEYES’ and ‘THESEATHATRAGEDNOMORE’.
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