The sea frightens me. It seems so cold and cruel, even when it looks warm and inviting. It was with some wariness, therefore, that I approached David Austin’s first novel, in which the sea, or the Sea, as it is sometimes called in this book, is a major player. Robert Radnor has returned from India ‘with a little splash of publicity’ generated through his being the only survivor of the Golden Delta, a rusty tramp steamer ‘blown round the world by the winds of whatever trade could be found’ and finally obliterated by a tidal wave. Radnor, who is already going mad and losing his life-long desire to be a sailor, has foreseen the tragedy, as he foresees others, because he and the Sea have a strange relationship — the clear calling of the title — which grants him a special intuition that survives ‘outside of the modern world with its greed for data’. Once back in England, Radnor sets up home in a shack near a fishing village, where he lives in silent and lonely eccentricity, carving wooden heads, growing long hair and a beard and causing June Morrow, the local postmistress, a headache or two. As his world is threatened and his life draws to a close, he goes on a ‘last voyage’ through his mind.
David Austin has a real feel for the sea and this little book has a splendid way of creaking and groaning, until you end up feeling a little queasy yourself, rolled and bowled relentlessly backwards and forwards, with no safe haven for a breather. The mood is unrelievedly dark, and the authorial voice tolls a very doleful bell. There is no comfort, even at the end, and several times whilst I was reading it I was reminded of Conrad’s ‘the horror, the horror’, a phrase which would not have been out of place on the bridge of the Golden Delta as she sank in the Bay of Bengal, drowned by a wave as big as a cathedral.
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