Customer Reviews

Secrets of the Sea: A Novel (P.S.)

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(4.5 stars) Set on the remote southeast coast of Tasmania, the isolated island at the southernmost tip of Australia, Nicholas Shakespeare's latest novel examines the lives of Alex and Merridy Dove as they try to create satisfying lives, cope with traumatic childhood memories, and ultimately decide that "[We'd] better start living. We're dead an awfully long time." Wellington Point, the fictional town in which they live on Tasmania's southeast coast, faces Oyster Bay, a battered shoreline open to ferocious gales coming from the nearest land mass to the south--Antarctica--a place where only the hardiest and most independent souls manage to wrest a living from the land or the sea.

Alex and Merridy Dove have both faced tragedy. Alex lost both of his parents when he was only eleven, after which he was sent to England. Returning twelve years later, he meets and falls in love with Merridy, whose much-adored brother vanished when he was seven and she was five. Though she does not love Alex when they are married, she believes that she will learn to love him, and they look forward to having a family and living on the farm.

Shakespeare, who lives in Tasmania for four months a year, creates a vibrant picture of life at Wellington Point, and of the connections the inhabitants forge with each other and with the land and the sea. Moving back and forth in time, the novel provides the individual backgrounds of all the characters, their courtships and love affairs, their hopes for the future, and their personal interests. As Alex, the realist-farmer, and his wife, the believer in dreams, await the arrival of children who do not arrive, their lives and their marriage are tested.

The leisurely pace of this seemingly domestic novel quickens with the arrival of Kish, a teenage orphan whom Alex and Merridy rescue from a ferocious storm. Kish is part of a program to give young boys in trouble a chance to learn from their experiences on a three-month sail around the island. Merridy and Alex give Kish a place to stay and a job, each of them trying to force Kish into their memories of the past and their dreams for the future. Ultimately, all three of them feel betrayed.

The novel, which has been rooted in reality for about three quarters of its length, changes dramatically with the arrival of Kish, as various characters begin to experience illusions and see ghosts of the past. The line between reality and fantasy blurs and is complicated by the characters' failure to communicate, so that they often misinterpret what they "see." The surges of the sea sometimes parallel the characters' surges of passion, and the sea's "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" is sometimes matched by the characters' separations, emotional and physical. Ultimately, all the loose ends get tied up, but this is sometimes done on the basis of coincidence, and the gothic change from pure realism to a mixture of realism and fantasy may annoy some readers. The characters are sympathetically drawn, however, and the reader who loves intimate family sagas and depictions of unusual places will be captivated by this unusual and well-written novel. n Mary Whipple

Snowleg
The Dancer Upstairs: A Novel
In Tasmania

The small Town small island is wonderfully evoked by Nicholas Shakespeare by using snippets from the local storekeepers news letters and the whole book gives you a feel of being part of this Tasmanian community.
The story is a gentle tale of life in Wellington Point;Alex Dove's return to his parents farm, his marriage to Merridy and the life they build together with the help of an Oyster farm.
The book engages and holds your interest without ever challenging although it does have the faintest hint of Patrick White about it in the way it portrays the life and lives of the community it is set.
A pleasant book to read.