Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach by Jean Sprackland
| Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach by Jean Sprackland | |
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| Category: Travel | |
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Reviewer: Lesley Mason
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| Summary: Wandering the same stretch of beach over a whole year provokes a series of essays that range from the lyrical to the investigative. Easy to read, full of quirky information and maybe just a gentle call to wider appreciation of what is right there on our doorstep, and what we're doing to it. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 237 | Date: May 2012 |
| Publisher: Jonathan Cape | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9780224087452 | |
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Sprackland is a poet, and a good one. At least I assume she's a good poet – I rarely read poetry these days. Her first collection was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, her second was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award and her third won the 2007 Costa Poetry Award. Unless all of the panels harbour the same judges, that's a lot of people thinking this is someone special.
That worried me slightly. I wondered if her Year of Discoveries on the Beach might lean too far into the poetic for my taste. I love lyrical writing, but only up to a point. In personal reflections it can easily stray beyond the beautiful into the pretentious. I should have given those judges more credit: Sprackland can write!
She can (and does) write beautifully. But she also writes matter of factly. Sometimes with wit, sometimes with pathos, sometimes with a simplification of the scientific perhaps as much for her own understanding as ours.
The beach in question is the Ainsdale Sands on England's west coast between Blackpool and Liverpool, or as she puts it a stretch of shore bookended by Southport Pier to the north and Formby point to the south. This is an area that the author has been walking for 20 years, but when it looks as though a move to London is on the cards she decides she wants to honour all that her wanderings have given over her time there, by spending a year looking more closely and recording what she might see.
Sensibly she doesn't seek to give us a month by month account. Instead we have 24 essays compiled by season. In length they range from three pages, to about twenty. Every single one of them is a pleasure to read . Some are deeply personal in the way you would expect of a poet, others explore the nature of the beach and its creatures and our effect on the world in much more investigative terms. So although the work is inspired by the walks on the strand, many of the discoveries were actually made on the internet and by talking to people and reading books. She calls it a kind of travel book, and demonstrates that the best travel writing focuses surprisingly little on the 'travel' and much on the deeper understanding of what is encountered.
As a result there is also a startling amount of knowledge captured and shared. In my home, the best of conversations in variably start with one of us stating I didn't know… as a prelude to sharing. This book produced a number of those.
We open in Spring with the longest and my favourite essay, which is all about the shifting nature of sands, and shipwrecks and scavenging. It is probably the most lyrical of the reflections, but it appeals to me because I recognise my own responses and romances, interludes from my own childhood, in all the things she touches on.
Spring also gives us the Mermaid's Purse, Prozac, gooseberries and jelly among other delights.
Summer stays with food on Poor Man's Asparagus but wanders off into memories of summer holidays. If you're of a certain age, you will remember the rules: the first game of the year was played on approach and involved a race to be the first one to sing out I can see the sea-eee (and there was me thinking that was just in my family); there were the precise requirements of where you claimed your pitch to 'set up camp' (remember how much 'stuff' we used to take down to the beach?). Of course, such reflections lead into thoughts on pollution across the years, describing some horrors I'd not heard of before. Yet elsewhere she dispels other assumptions that have lingered for years… all that foamy residue is not necessarily pollution at all.
Autumn brings potatoes. Well, sea potatoes, which it seems are actually the tests of a particular type of urchin. It also brings plastic ducks and other toys, a story now well known, but only one among many others. The Great Garbage Patch raises its ugly head more than once throughout the year. As Autumn is the season of Halloween and all things spooky, perhaps its right that this is where she includes tales of the Stella Maris with its arm that continues to live and function after severance from the body. Who needs horror films when you have a saltwater aquarium?
Winter is the season of driftwood and fire-making. The season of storms when more of what has been dumped, or more innocently lost, at sea makes a return bid for land. Cryptic messages in bottles haven't travelled very far. Footprints are revealed that are millennia old, and are washed away on the next tide.
Sprackland has achieved her aim. She succeeds in honouring a place that is very special to her. In doing so, she issues a silent claim for all of us to look more closely at the places that are (even if just for now) home. Few of us would do as brilliant a job as she has of recording what we find, but we all have much to learn if just took a little time now and again to follow up on those little things that intrigue us when we stumble across them.
I loved this book, I'll freely admit, because it chimes so well with me. It speaks of memories, of places that I want to go, and places I have been, and places that while on neither list are similar enough to those that are. I have findlings on my window sill, just as she has on her mantelpiece – though none of mine come from famous ocean liners. I have picked up coal on the beach and was taught snippets of The Ancient Mariner by someone who'd looked an albatross in the eye and understood. I've poked about in the rubbish and watched the landscape of my childhood vanish. I share her sneaking admiration for the herring gull.
I also loved it because of all the things I didn't know: all of those creatures, Irukandji, the fact that wrecks rise and sink, that there was once an official Uncorker of Ocean Bottles, how the seasquirt is informing the science of transplant rejection and the potential of jellyfish in treatment for Alzheimers, or why the gribble might be important to our future energy supply…
If your idea of the ultimate beach book is some chunky piece of fiction to keep you entertained while you while away days of sunshine, let me tempt you with something different: something to read before you get to the beach that might just get you out of the recliner and start wandering and looking and wondering.
For more reflections on Britain's coast you could try The Kingdom by the Sea by Paul Theroux but be prepared for a very different take.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach by Jean Sprackland at Amazon.com.
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