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 "Ocean
Sea" is the sort of book that will trail the following words like the tentacles on a
jellyfish: haunting, mystical, lyrical, enchanting, hypnotic, melancholy,
tragic. Yet the surfeit of image and incantation that produces these effects also makes it as irritating as a grain of sand in the soft flesh of an
oyster.
Prismatic and multifaceted as a poem, the novel brings to mind Archibald MacLeish's youthful injunction, "a poem must not mean/But be." But this isn't a poem, it's a novel -- and that's where the trouble lies.
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If you were to lay all the elements of the plot end to end and stretch it out like a rope tied into a series of knots along its length, the story would make no sense at all. You can think of it, instead, as structured like a whirlpool, going down, down, down into a central well of horror, and then spitting up again its various elements to bob and weave their way into the light. The story of "Ocean Sea" concerns several people, remarkable in their way, who meet at the mysterious Almayer Inn, located in some unspecified country by the sea. "This is the seashore ... " explains one. "Neither land nor sea. It's a place that does not exist."
Among the characters there is Elisewin, a young girl afflicted with a strange sort of melancholy, which rests upon her light as a breath but which is slowly stealing away her life; there is a society painter who fled his life of fame and his flattering portraits of the bovine rich and who now paints the sea, over and over again, with sea water; there is a man obsessed with a woman he has only imagined, who haunts the margins of the sea in an effort to find its limits; there is a beautiful adulteress; there is Adams, a mysterious sailor who seeks a terrible vengeance.
The inn is run by a group of children who, like the cats in Alastair Reid's poem, ask odd questions and interfere in dreams. They are playful, wise and demonic: During a storm, they rush along the seacoast bearing lights to lure lost ships onto the rocks and to destruction. One of them counsels the sailor bent on vengeance, "Stop waiting. It's not so difficult to kill someone."
Much of the book is playful as the children; Bartleboom, the professor of abstruse desire, is an amiable, pleasant man who wonders how he will recognize the woman he has spent years writing tender letters to, letters he keeps in a chest in his room. He becomes fast friends with the taciturn painter, Plasson, who struggles day after day, standing in the waters while the waves lap about his feet, trying and failing to paint the sea because he cannot find its eyes:
"The problem is, where the dickens are the eyes of the sea? I shall never get anything done until I find out, because that is the beginning, do you see? The beginning of everything, and until I know where they are I shall carry on spending my days looking at this damned stretch of water without -- " The little boy Dood, who inhabits a windowsill, explains that ships are the eyes of the sea, and shipwrecks mean that the sea has closed its eyes.
The playful glides directly into the horrible as, in the middle of the book, you are swept into the heart of the sea, where a wrecked ship spews out four lifeboats and a quickly cobbled raft, abandoned and left drifting as the lifeboats pull away, leaving nearly 150 men to die. Silently, methodically, horribly, the weak on the raft are slain by the strong, slashed, hacked, thrown into the water. The sailor Adams guards his lover, Therese; but a doctor, Savigny, steals over one night and slits her throat. Adams, who in the womb of the sea has seen unutterable horror, is forever inconsolable: "Only he who is never in danger is really saved. A ship might even appear, now, on the horizon, and speed here on the waves to arrive a second before death and take us away, and have us return alive, alive -- but this would not save us, really. Even if we ever found ourselves ashore somewhere again, we shall never again be saved. And what we have seen will remain in our eyes, what we have done will remain on our hands, what we have felt will remain in our souls. And forever, we who have known the truth, forever, we the children of horror, forever, we the veterans of the womb, forever, we the wise and sagaious, forever -- we shall be inconsolable.
"Inconsolable.
"Inconsolable."
"Inconsolable.
"Inconsolable."
At this point, and at several other lachrymose and salty places, you feel rather like one who is flailing in the water with waves crashing on his head. Do these relentless effects succeed? I don't know: It depends on your tolerance for this sort of pounding, poisoned lyricism. A little might be bracing, but after a while you want to dry off and think a little. And you might, upon doing so, decide that this determined lyricism is the enemy of thought.
Certainly the story's resolution, if you can call it that, is unsatisfying. The characters' fates play out in ways alternately playful and gruesome, as if they have been flung out by a whirlpool and left to perish or thrive back on the land. Some live, some die. They have been changed by each other; they have been changed by the sea. Their destinies don't seem haphazard -- they seem ritualized, planned, inevitable -- not by the inner workings of character, but by the poetic structure of the book.
The book isn't predictable, at least: It isn't workshopped; no conventional hand has smoothed off all its rough edges and made it work. That is something, in a world of books that are "product," stocked neatly on a genre shelf. This book is like nothing else I know except, perhaps, its lyrical, haunting, mysterious predecessor "Silk." It is more akin to lyric poetry with its rough, wild edges.
But as a novel "Ocean Sea" is too obscure to be enlightening, too overwrought and overimagined to convince.
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