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Sea Holly is a first novel by well-known poet and essayist, Robert Minhinnick, whose most recent collection of essays, To Babel and Back, won the Wales Book of the Year in 2006.
Set in a tawdry seaside resort during the last week of the tourist season, Sea Holly’s minimalist plot concerns the disappearance of a teenage schoolgirl with whom the main character, John Vine, has had a clandestine relationship. Vine has abandoned his family and his career and is living on a desolate caravan site with an illegal immigrant and working as a bingo caller.
But this is a novel of ideas, in which plot serves to connect the narrative voices and, though pivotal, is secondary to the more complex mysteries being explored. There were many times when I felt uncertain of what was going on, yet this is of the essence when you are treading a shifting boundary between disparate realities. Everything and everyone is on the edge here, from the landscape and the season to the characters and their lives. There is no single truth, no precise point of transition between sea and land, between summer and autumn, between teenage-hood, adulthood, mid-life and old age, between sanity and insanity.
The evocation of place is extraordinary, creating the impression that the characters and their individual stories are both reflected in and shaped by the shifting sands and ever-changing seas of The Caib. Minhinnick’s use of language is consummate: each word chosen, every sentence crafted and honed. There were times when I simply allowed myself to luxuriate and float with the language, others when I felt dragged down and drowned by it.
Sea Holly is a demanding and difficult book but, as one of the narrators says, ‘don’t make your mind up too soon. And keep listening. It’s been a little complicated around here lately and you’re bound to feel confused. Just be alert.’
Suzy Ceulan Hughes
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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Author Biography: An environmental campaigner, Robert Minhinnick has an international reputation as a poet and essayist. He has travelled to, and written about many parts of the world and is recognised as one of Wales’ foremost poets. His first poetry collection was published more than twenty-five years ago. He has won the Forward Poetry Prize twice and his last book, To Babel and Back – a series of essays from America, Iraq and his native Wales – was the Welsh Book of the Year 2006. Further Information: A stunning debut novel from this award-winning poet and essayist, Sea Holly is a story of drifting, burnt-out lives, shadowed by the mysterious disappearance of a vivacious young girl.
Sea Holly tells the story of John Vine, a hard working English teacher who has left job and family and moved to a nearby coastal caravan park, calling bingo numbers for a living. "John Vine? He has it all. Home, family, career. You can’t knock that. But he has this worm inside him, this dissatisfaction… A boy of twenty, that's OK, he’s going to dream. But a man of fifty? With a young piece who thinks he’s not half bad?…believe me that's when everything's going to come loose. That’s when it’s going to get dangerous.'
Key to the novel is a deeply rooted sense of place: a seaside town of shifting sand, illegal immigrants, a decaying funfair with it's own 'kingdom of evil', amusement arcades and dubious pubs and clubs, existing cheek by jowl with town houses and middle-class intelligentsia. The narrative stretches over one week and is told by several different characters.
Minhinnick makes an assured transition to fiction and dialogue. And, as with his poetry, his prose is superb, rich with vibrant, exotic imagery, from the black sands of Spain to the black sea of 'The Caib'. His novel creates a sinister but vivid human world, existing as a part of the natural world on the edge of the ever-present sea and sand, which seep through the novel. Through its characters and environment, Sea Holly explores transience and permanence, stretching from the prehistoric past to the present day obsession with mobile phone filming and images. And behind all the lives captured is the image of Rachel, an 18-year-old pupil of Vine's who has suddenly vanished, leaving only briefly visible traces of her existence, and a deep sense of unease.
Sea Holly
'The sea was a pit where neon figures waved and drowned.'
Robert Minhinnick's first novel, Sea Holly, is set on The Caib: a peninsula somewhere in Wales, at the end of nowhere. On it stands The Kingdom, a run-down fun-fair, its cheap rides, plastic horrors and third-rate entertainments holding out, just, for the last night of the season. In the adjacent caravan park live the human flotsam who will keep the show on the road maybe one more time, before the developers move in: the burnt-out alcoholic, the dreamer of failed el dolrados, the illegal migrant passing through, eyes on better things, and above them all, the owner, whose memory still salivates at that time, way back, when Richard Burton called by.
In the middle of this gallery of misfits is John Vine, a teacher turned bingo-caller, separated from his wife and children, for whom The Caib is a purgatory where he must contemplate the disaster and the absurdity of his liaison with Rachel, a former pupil. And Rachel? No-one knows where she is, or at least that's what they say. And her disappearance becomes part of the collective nightmare, exposing the guilt of all, underlining the fact that if this is a place of tedium, of spent lives, its geology also holds a deep stratum of menace and unease.
Sea Holly relates a week in the life of The Caib but opens a window on millennia of earlier histories and on the nature of history itself. Constantly engulfed by sand, bounded by the merciless sea, this is a place where people can only be transient, and yet they hang on, tenaciously, from generation to generation, building new dream places, watching them rust and collapse.
Robert Minhinnick, a celebrated poet and an incomparable writer of place, has produced a novel of dark brilliance: an acute study of human frailty made exhilarating through the extraordinary power of its observation and language
Cyfnewidfa Lên Cymru/Wales Literature Exchange |
