Stories and the sea. They go together, and there’s a reason why.
It may look like more than one reason, because in our stories the sea appears, like a grand old actor, in many different roles. But when you get down to it, I think it’s the same one.
It can be a platform for adventure. It provides a strange world, away from the one we know, in which imagination can roam free. I loved the C S Forester’s Hornblower novels as a child. They were filled with the language of seafaring, yawing and luffing and weathering storms. The sea is full of riches for the storyteller. You can let it bring you islands of pirates, junks and slave ships, terrible monsters and all that. You can – and this is very useful, if you are putting together a story – use it as a way of getting from place to place, scene to scene. ‘All aboard,’
cried the captain. ‘We sail with the evening tide,’ and off you go, with
the wind in your sails and a song in your heart. Looked at this way, the
long grass of Neil and Daniel’s Sea of Green in Pirates of Pangea is doing exactly what a sea should, even though it’s not wet and those sharp-toothy things down there are not sharks.
But we also use the sea in another way. It has a presence. It’s a powerful source of imagery and mood music, that doesn’t need to act directly on the story in order to influence it. At the same time I was reading Forester I was also reading Tolkien (there were at least a couple of years in my life when I read almost nothing else.) In Lord of the Rings the actors never lay eyes on the sea – not until right at the very end. And yet it’s referred to again and again. It’s there, enormous, impervious even to the vast evil of the world, setting a border to everything, calling everything that is good and beautiful to cross its shores. And in the end, they do. How many stories end with a departure by water? It’s a way of drawing a line under things. It is the image of a peaceful, accepting death, without having to write the words ‘they died.’ The sea has the power to do that for you.
Why do we walk by the sea? Taking a coast path immediately limits your freedom. It cuts the directions you can head in down to two. But of course, it’s not the physical freedom that matters. It’s the mental freedom – peaceful, exciting, however you like it – of walking along in the company of something utterly strange. Something you can see, touch, even cross. But to which you can never belong.
That’s the stuff of stories.