Vita Sackville-West

Edmund Carr is at sea in more ways than one. An eminent journalist and self-made man, he has recently discovered that he has only a short time to live. Leaving his job on a Fleet Street paper, he takes a passage on a cruise ship where he knows that Laura, a beautiful and intelligent widow whom he secretly admires, will be a fellow passenger. Exhilarated by the distant vista of exotic islands never to be visited and his conversations with Laura, Edmund finds himself rethinking all his values. A voyage on many levels, those long purposeless days at sea find Edumnd relinquishing the past as he discovers the joys and the pain of a love he is simultaneously determined to conceal.

No Signposts in the Sea

Clapton Jonsson

This novel made me think of the word “ignorant” a few times while reading it. It’s the first book I read by the author and I realize it’s not her masterpiece. It even says in the refreshingly honest introduction that the book “is not a great novel.” I thought of the word “ignorant” not in a mean way, but in the context of an author trying to write about something that she doesn’t fully comprehend. She had an idea for a story, but needed characters somewhat alien to her to fill it.

At one point VSW lets us know that the main character, Edmund Carr, has written one of the foremost works on the Middle East. Apparently that piece of background information fit the character she had in mind at the moment of writing. Later in the book VSW lets us know that Edmund Carr never had the urge to leave Britain and that, in fact, he has never been abroad before. That piece of background information probably fit the character she then had in mind at that particular moment of writing.

The problem is, of course, that the sum total of the character of Edmund Carr becomes contradictory and not very believable. The author must have detected such an obvious contradiction without changing it, or have believed that it was perfectly credible. If it were the former, I would have said that she was lazy not to have adjusted the character as his background developed (but since VSW was suffering from the cancer that would eventually take her life, laziness would be the wrong word). If it were the latter, it proves my point.

“I’ve had a good life on the whole. It was a bit of a struggle at first, my people were very poor, and the village school isn’t the best start for an education,” Carr says on one page. A person who has been “very poor” describes his childhood poverty as “a bit of a struggle at first”? It seems as if VSW wants a character with a certain background, but cannot manage to tailor the character’s personality in accordance with that certain background, because she has no idea what it implies.

Of course, you could say the same about me, that I have no idea what I’m talking about. Fair enough. If you buy the above, then let us cite the next page in the book, where Carr continues: “It wasn’t so easy in those days, over thirty years ago, and I hated having to ask my parents for financial help.” So, Carr comes from a very poor family, where he went to a village school that “isn’t the best start for an education,” but some years later he is at university where he doesn’t want to ask his parents to pay for it – not because they can’t afford it, but because he “hated” asking them. I don’t know; to me VSW seems to describe a childhood and adulthood completely alien to each other: the childhood of her imaginary character coming from poverty, and the adulthood of people of her own social strata.

While reading the book, I made a note that “the writing feels a little lazy; indulgent and without structure.” Beyond the desultory character development, the writing itself suffers from the same characteristic. The observations are uninteresting, and there is no story to save the lackluster style from boring the reader. It feels as if the author was struggling to find an idea for the book: it feels written by someone who rarely stepped out of her social comfort zone, writing for people who rarely stepped out of their social comfort zone. To these people, seeing darker-skinned foreigners on a boat trip was probably fascinating. I'm not saying that the author should have known better; she was a product of her time and class – but it's not a very interesting book for the modern reader.

No Signposts in the Sea

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