The Books That Made me
The Booker-longlisted author discusses the novels that inspired his new book, The Draw of The Sea, an exploration of our relationships with the oceans.
It’s no exaggeration to say I have a novel to thank for my love of the sea and, in particular, for my love of sailing. When I talk to sailors, they almost inevitably mention Swallows and Amazons as one of the influences that first drew them to the water. Many of them are, even as adults, still looking for that same sense of adventure and freedom they felt when they first read Arthur Ransome’s classic novels of the Walker and Blackett children. My introduction to sailing in literature wasn’t through Ransome, though; it was Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle that first captured my imagination.
As a child, I dreamt of sailing on Ged’s small boat, Lookfar, across the Earthsea archipelago, of heading out to the place where the raft people live their lives entirely at on the water, or to the far west reaches where dragons are found. I’ve had my own boats since and though they’ve all had different names, to my mind they’re all versions of Lookfar. I think it was because I really wanted to be a wizard when I was older and, eventually realising that this was unlikely, becoming a sailor seemed to be the next best thing. There’s a wonderful line in Le Guin’s novel The Farthest Shore which I often think on about the similarity between wizards and sailors. Both, Le Guin writes, use the power of the wind to bring close what is far away. I loved that idea and I still get the sense there is something slightly magical about sailing. I still get that same thrill whenever I’m being propelled across the water by nothing more than a sail lifted to the wind.
As a student, I lost and found myself in Hemingway’s, The Old Man and The Sea, Jim Crace’s Signals of Distress and Melville’s Moby Dick, and I continue to immerse myself in watery novels, including Carsten Jensen’s phenomenal epic, We, The Drowned and Ian McGuire’s The North Water. If I can’t be on the water, at least I can read about being afloat.
The idea for The Draw of The Sea came out of a novel too. When my first book, The Many, came out in 2016 wherever I went to talk about it at bookshops and literary festivals, above everything else I found people wanted to talk about their relationships with the sea. The Many is set in a small fishing village much like those you might find around the Cornish coast, and it seemed to strike a chord with readers whether they lived in the centre of a city, or on a different coastline entirely, on the Gower or the Northumberland coast. It provided a comparison to their own experiences, perhaps though, listening to them describe the sea as they saw it, it occurred to me that we all see the oceans slightly differently.
In The Draw of The Sea, I wanted to explore how other people who have made their lives around the coasts view the oceans on their doorstep, what brings them back to it, and the ways in which it energises, consoles, thrills and calms. I sought out sea swimmers and surfers, freedivers and sailors, beachcombers and fishermen, artists and gig rowers. And I discovered, in their stories, diverse deep and often spiritual connections with the sea, each of which has, to my eyes at least, a small element of magic I first saw in the Le Guin’s Earthsea.