Secrets of the Sea by Nicholas Shakespeare

The plot: A man and woman who have each experienced tragedy early in life learn to love each other in marriage. Over time, expectations grow into unspoken disappointments. The sudden arrival of a young man upsets the harmony the two have negotiated, giving each spouse the opportunity to see what has gone carefully unnoticed for years. So revealed, the two must decide whether the marriage can continue.

Maybe I’ve waited too long to write about this book. Maybe this book was one that demanded instant review while my senses were still agitated by the story, the book’s climate, before the deadening effect of other thoughts, concerns, rolled whatever feeling I had for the book into flat line. Maybe it was too much to drive headlong into the solid quiet berth of a Tasmanian farm after the forthright action in Swamplandia! Maybe I was unprepared for a British voice.

The writer is decidedly British – quiet tone, indirect narration, slipping away from the present into character's memories only to return again as if by etude; a melody that can be clipped, bossing characters. We take a strong enough interest in the characters to stay planted in the chair. Our pair tends disappointment like a little child, and it seems a narrative feat that the two never become sluggish with their task and we, as readers, stay interested. Shakespeare writes in part, from a female perspective, about the desire to be a mother, infidelity, and domestic constraints. Some of those passages strain against the dress. What is captured so well though is the complexity of emotion that sometimes underlies ambivalence. Like The Master Bedroom, life-altering decisions in Secrets of the Sea are driven, in large part, by ambivalence – of acquiescence. Ambivalence is a hard card to make a winning hand. Both books demonstrate the truth that some things are better left unspoken. But that kind of resolution leaves me uneasy – especially when the characters’ resolve seems ill fated and temporary.

It would be a little reductive but also accurate to say that I enjoyed the book like good TV. It was pleasurable while it was happening. But the feeling afterward is a little bit of nausea. Disappointment and ambivalence wrought in fiction don’t stick easily, they last like burrs that you examine after you close the book and dislodge.