The Call Of The Sea

English nature writer Philip Hoare celebrates the beauty, romanticism and peril of the sea.

- Mark Broatch

‘I often find it’s only at the end that you discover what you’ve been writing about,” says English writer Philip Hoare. “And what I’m writing about is the compulsion we have for the sea. The sense that this element contains 90% of the life on this planet and yet it’s not an element we can easily enter or study or observe or chart. It’s a poetic symbol of our disconnection, but also our connection, to the world.

“As you know in New Zealand, an island is ultimately connected by the sea to everywhere else. You’re not isolated; the sea is everything. I just went off on a voyage and started thinking about the whale, because the whale is the animation of that life: it leaves the ocean to briefly become part of our life. To be held there, stilled in between the two elements, the human, gravity-bound, land-bound life that we lead, and the oceanic life of freedom that a whale lives. I don’t apologise for my romanticism because we must reclaim that romanticism. There is so much awfulness about our reaction and the way we treat the natural world that we need that romantic notion, we need the beauty of the ocean.”

Hoare is talking about his latest book, RisingTideFallingStar, but it could be any of the last few, including Leviathan, which won the Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. Much the same as the earlier books, RisingTide is poetic, deeply researched, and difficult to categorise, though something akin to essay meets nature writing meets memoir. “I try and avoid all categories if possible.” How humans categorise things is part of the problem, he says. “A lot of nature writing is about appropriation, about giving names to things, bringing them into our experience.”