Dark, Salt, Clear
As seen:
Reviews
St Just Monday Morning Reading Group 26th February 2024.
Dark, salt, clear: life in a Cornish fishing town. Lamorna Ash.
This was thought to be an ‘interesting’ book by most of the group – one or two were less impressed and only found parts of it interesting. We noted that this book is classified as ‘history of Cornwall’, which we questioned, but were unable to state precisely what it might be instead. We suggested it might be ‘life-writing’ – not an autobiography either, but a documentary perhaps, or an insightful tale concerning a short period of the author’s life.
We saw the main subject of the book as being about fishing: the business of catching and processing fish in the seas off Newlyn, the life fishermen lead, and their ambivalent relationship with fish and with the sea. We talked about how uncertain their living is, how hard and dangerous the work, the quotas and the fish that have to be thrown back, and how it appears that in some cases being a fisherman isn’t much of a choice, but something people are born into.
The author, who is Cornish by birth, is honest about having lived elsewhere for most of her life, and about the process she went through of returning to Cornwall and ‘interviewing the locals’, we thought. We admired her courage in going out with the fishing boats and their male crews, and doing helpful work while she was with them as well.
Several people considered that the narrative is slightly overloaded with quotations, in perhaps an overly academic style. Also some found it challenging to read because it contained so many stand-alone passages which were at tangents from the main story – these, we thought, were pieces that had been written separately for the Times Literary Supplement.
We’re a west Cornwall reading group and several of us had local connections with the book. We wondered (though we didn’t find out in this discussion) what outsiders with no local knowledge might have thought of it. It seems likely that Lamorna Ash will produce further books and we’d like to read them, we thought.
