W. Towrie Cutt's Seven for the Sea (1972) came up in conversation with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rushthatspeaks a few weeks ago, so I finally dug it out of its box and read it last night for the first time in at least fifteen years. Unfortunately, it is as I remember it from my childhood: a haunting folktale-tragedy with a narrative so bland and perfunctory, I have trouble recommending the book even though it's one of the few straight-up selkie novels I know.
It can be retold so that it sounds fantastic. Erchie Ward has come up from Edinburgh to spend his summer holiday with family in the Orkneys; on the ferry from Kirkwall to Sanday, he and his cousin Mansie pass the time diagramming their relationships to one another through their mysterious great-great-grandfather Selkie Ward and his even more mysterious wife. There's a family legend that she was "a sea-wife," but it's equally well-known that she was drowned with all but the youngest of her seven sons the night she ran away from her husband. They say he used to wear a sealskin vest under his clothes, fur side inward, like a hair shirt. It's midsummer, Johnsmas, the longest day of the year; the boys talk of kelpies and when a sudden fog closes in around the ferry, the reader is not really surprised when it lifts to reveal the past. In the present day of a hundred years ago, Selkie Ward is a handsome, hard-working crofter who turned his life around from being a drunk and a brawler when he married his dark, plump, beautiful Seawife, seven years ago. Their children all swim swift and sleekly, with the same great dark eyes as their mother. She wears round her neck two pieces of ancient amber, strangely carved: "Selkie took them from the Meerigeo burial mound for me. They stop the pull o' the sea." They welcome in the two cousins; the days pass with sun and seabirds and kelp burning; and all is well, except that the local women still look askance at Seawife and Selkie's old friends still rag on him for giving up the drink—and the seal-hunt—because a woman asked him to, and it all comes to a head when Selkie's pressed to recover the cargo from a smuggler's sloop, "three kilderkins of rum and one firkin of brandy." He comes home incapable drunk, bitterly weeping. There's one of his old drinking companions, flashing a malicious grin at Seawife. There's a bloody skin on the floor, fur side down. And no one ever kept a selkie where she did not desire to be. Time comes down again and Mansie and Erchie know what they know, with pieces of amber in their hands as proof. "She said she would not need them anymore."—"Aye, Erch." (They have the rough skin between their fingers, the reddish mark on their necks—) "But we might."
In memory, I had this novel classified with Peter Blair's The Coming of Pout (1966), another book from my childhood that doesn't quite work, but it's really not the same problem at all. The Coming of Pout is unable to follow through on its shadowy-comic web of half-hints and mixed mythical allusions, but I enjoy it up to the point it does a Coyote look-down and crashes to earth. Seven for the Sea never comes alive for more than a few lines here and there. Its atmosphere should be at once idyllic and inexorable, with the two cousins falling easily into the summer-sweet past and caught in the break and drag of time, knowing by the family stories that something will have to go wrong, unable to prevent it or even guess what. It can be as technical as it likes about the details of life on Sanday in the mid-nineteenth century, but the line that pulls the reader through should be the mystery of Seawife and Selkie Ward. Instead one thing happens and then another. There's the storm. There's the sloop. There's the gauger. There's Mansie and Erchie, who have so little differentiable personality as to be the oddly doubled equivalent of the pure first-person lens narrator. There's the character who seems to exist in both layers of time at once, but instead of being a numinously unexplained figure, mostly he feels like an insufficiently justified plot device. There are no ambiguities. No one is real enough for shadows.
And I cannot stop being fond of this book, because I read it one summer at my grandparents' house when I was in elementary school and discovering all the folklore, but it wanted to be written by Mollie Hunter or Susan Cooper or George Mackay Brown, and it's not. I suppose if you ever run into a library copy, give it a read and tell me whether I've completely missed the point. Otherwise, I shall just re-read A Stranger Came Ashore (1975) and wait for someone I know to write the great YA selkie story.
In the meantime, I am off to see One Touch of Venus with my family at the Boston Conservatory; it's my mother's birthday observed, so we're taking her. Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash, S.J. Perelman: I figure either it'll be terrific or it will fail in fascinating ways. Last night was spent atwind05 and Sabitha's Second Thanksgiving, mostly talking about science fiction with a visiting philosopher from the University of Texas at Austin. Comments notification for LJ still appears to be borked—I haven't received any since Wednesday—but I have no idea how to contact someone to complain about it. Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) is exactly as amazing as the interview made it sound.
rushthatspeaks a few weeks ago, so I finally dug it out of its box and read it last night for the first time in at least fifteen years. Unfortunately, it is as I remember it from my childhood: a haunting folktale-tragedy with a narrative so bland and perfunctory, I have trouble recommending the book even though it's one of the few straight-up selkie novels I know.It can be retold so that it sounds fantastic. Erchie Ward has come up from Edinburgh to spend his summer holiday with family in the Orkneys; on the ferry from Kirkwall to Sanday, he and his cousin Mansie pass the time diagramming their relationships to one another through their mysterious great-great-grandfather Selkie Ward and his even more mysterious wife. There's a family legend that she was "a sea-wife," but it's equally well-known that she was drowned with all but the youngest of her seven sons the night she ran away from her husband. They say he used to wear a sealskin vest under his clothes, fur side inward, like a hair shirt. It's midsummer, Johnsmas, the longest day of the year; the boys talk of kelpies and when a sudden fog closes in around the ferry, the reader is not really surprised when it lifts to reveal the past. In the present day of a hundred years ago, Selkie Ward is a handsome, hard-working crofter who turned his life around from being a drunk and a brawler when he married his dark, plump, beautiful Seawife, seven years ago. Their children all swim swift and sleekly, with the same great dark eyes as their mother. She wears round her neck two pieces of ancient amber, strangely carved: "Selkie took them from the Meerigeo burial mound for me. They stop the pull o' the sea." They welcome in the two cousins; the days pass with sun and seabirds and kelp burning; and all is well, except that the local women still look askance at Seawife and Selkie's old friends still rag on him for giving up the drink—and the seal-hunt—because a woman asked him to, and it all comes to a head when Selkie's pressed to recover the cargo from a smuggler's sloop, "three kilderkins of rum and one firkin of brandy." He comes home incapable drunk, bitterly weeping. There's one of his old drinking companions, flashing a malicious grin at Seawife. There's a bloody skin on the floor, fur side down. And no one ever kept a selkie where she did not desire to be. Time comes down again and Mansie and Erchie know what they know, with pieces of amber in their hands as proof. "She said she would not need them anymore."—"Aye, Erch." (They have the rough skin between their fingers, the reddish mark on their necks—) "But we might."
In memory, I had this novel classified with Peter Blair's The Coming of Pout (1966), another book from my childhood that doesn't quite work, but it's really not the same problem at all. The Coming of Pout is unable to follow through on its shadowy-comic web of half-hints and mixed mythical allusions, but I enjoy it up to the point it does a Coyote look-down and crashes to earth. Seven for the Sea never comes alive for more than a few lines here and there. Its atmosphere should be at once idyllic and inexorable, with the two cousins falling easily into the summer-sweet past and caught in the break and drag of time, knowing by the family stories that something will have to go wrong, unable to prevent it or even guess what. It can be as technical as it likes about the details of life on Sanday in the mid-nineteenth century, but the line that pulls the reader through should be the mystery of Seawife and Selkie Ward. Instead one thing happens and then another. There's the storm. There's the sloop. There's the gauger. There's Mansie and Erchie, who have so little differentiable personality as to be the oddly doubled equivalent of the pure first-person lens narrator. There's the character who seems to exist in both layers of time at once, but instead of being a numinously unexplained figure, mostly he feels like an insufficiently justified plot device. There are no ambiguities. No one is real enough for shadows.
And I cannot stop being fond of this book, because I read it one summer at my grandparents' house when I was in elementary school and discovering all the folklore, but it wanted to be written by Mollie Hunter or Susan Cooper or George Mackay Brown, and it's not. I suppose if you ever run into a library copy, give it a read and tell me whether I've completely missed the point. Otherwise, I shall just re-read A Stranger Came Ashore (1975) and wait for someone I know to write the great YA selkie story.
In the meantime, I am off to see One Touch of Venus with my family at the Boston Conservatory; it's my mother's birthday observed, so we're taking her. Kurt Weill, Ogden Nash, S.J. Perelman: I figure either it'll be terrific or it will fail in fascinating ways. Last night was spent at
wind05 and Sabitha's Second Thanksgiving, mostly talking about science fiction with a visiting philosopher from the University of Texas at Austin. Comments notification for LJ still appears to be borked—I haven't received any since Wednesday—but I have no idea how to contact someone to complain about it. Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) is exactly as amazing as the interview made it sound.
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