The wonderful edge of the sea

There are some classic novels about a boy growing up — Great Expectations and Kes spring to mind. Well, here is another. The Highest Tide is one of the best novels it has been my pleasure to read for many a day. And its cover is one of the worst it has been my misfortune to see. The author has been so badly served by this ugly, ill-drawn mess that if you have any sense you will buy it immediately and rejacket it in brown paper, as we did with our textbooks. But buy it you should. It is lyrical, moving, funny and breathtakingly well written.

Miles O’Malley is almost 14 and becoming aware of the fact, but there are far more important things in his life than puberty, though his friends would have him believe otherwise. He lives on the flats of Puget Sound and is in love with the creatures there. Rachel Carson, the 1950s author of The Edge of the Sea, is his heroine.

Marine life obsesses Miles and Lynch writes about the boy’s nights in his kayak, slowly crossing the bay under the moon, seeing a myriad magical sea creatures quite wonderfully. One test of a great novel is that you begin to see the world through the author’s eyes. Another is that you want to live in his book and The Highest Tide passes both. I even dreamed about it.

On one moonlit expedition, Miles sees something he cannot believe he is really seeing:

I saw fragments, pieces and tried to fuse them in my mind but couldn’t be certain of the whole. I knew what it had to be but I wouldn’t allow myself to even think the two words. Then I gradually realised the dark shiny disc in the middle of the rubbery mass was too perfectly round to be mud or a reflection. It was too late to smother my scream. Its eye was the size of a hubcap.

No, not science fiction, just a giant squid, where no such thing had appeared before.

Not rarely. Never. Most giant squid were found, if they were found at all, in the bellies of sperm whales or sprawled on the beaches of New Zealand, Norway and Newfoundland.

The world explodes. Professors of marine biology swarm everywhere, even local press become interested. But nothing like as interested as they are when Miles finds something else which is so rare on the flats of Puget Sound as to be a miracle. When yet another thing comes along, special powers are attributed to him. The earth is trying to tell him something and he has been specially chosen as its mouthpiece. That sort of thing. But Miles is not easily daunted. He has other things to do, such as looking after elderly Florence who should not be living alone because her illness makes her fall over. But Florence is one of those indomitable women who raise two fingers to the system and carries on, with Miles’s help. Then there is Angie, in whom he is more interested than he wants to be, though rather with his heart than any other part of his body.

Miles is clever, cool, wry, hilarious in the way he writes about himself, funny and touching about his parents:.

You may wonder how I came and went so easily … part of it was that I lived above the garage. The other part was that my folks never wanted to be parents. It’s not that there wasn’t love. There just wasn’t supervision.

Some of his observations make you cry with laughter and tears together.

The Highest Tide comes as a paperback original, sensible publishing for new fiction. But this is a great novel which you will want to reread. They might do things backwards and publish it next in hardback. Few new books deserve it as much.

Susan Hill’s latest book, The Pure in Heart, is published by Chatto.