The book:
March is rather a cold time to be considering any sea that touches the British Isles; and the North Sea is perhaps the most formidable of them all. But Tom Blass’ riveting new book, The Naked Shore, is so extremely good that we hope it will bring a warmth and richness to your early spring reading. That said, you’ll probably want to dive into this fabulous account somewhere indoors rather than settling down on a blustery beach.
Saturnine and quick-tempered, the formidable North Sea is often overlooked – even by those living within a stone’s throw of its steel-grey waters. But as playground, theatre of war and cultural crossing-point, it has shaped the world in myriad ways, forged villains and heroes, and determined the fates of nations. It’s not all grim, though: the seaside holiday was born on North Sea beaches, and artists, poets and writers have been as equally inspired by glinting sun on the wave-tops as they have the drama of a winter storm. With a wry eye and a warm coat, Tom Blass travels the edges of the North Sea meeting fishermen, artists, bomb disposal experts, burgermeisters – and those who have found themselves flung to the sea’s perimeters quite by chance. In doing so he attempts to piece together its manifold histories and to reveal truths, half-truths and fictions otherwise submerged.
What the Guardian thought:
At the end of this long, rich, illuminating and enjoyable study of the North Sea, Tom Blass describes his subject as an entity that “words can only fail”. “What I know,” he continues, “is that it is everything we say it is and none of those things, that it exists inside us and yet transcends us – possesses no boundaries other than those we inflict on it, neither moral values, nor narrative structures. They are all with us and not the sea.”
This might strike some as a curious admission. But it is Blass’s knowledge that his study is doomed to be partial, combined with his concern that he risks dispelling the wonder and the variety of his subject by containing it within language, which lends this book much of its power. He is often uncertain about how to think and write about the subjects he encounters – and that lends his judgments weight.
It also helps to account for the meandering and associative structure of his narrative. Blass opens the book with an account of a journey on a North Sea freighter as it crosses from the Humber to Gothenburg. He here offers a potted history of the shifting identities and functions of the waters over the centuries (it has been a site for war, trade, crime, exploration; for artistic, technological and scientific innovation), before moving in the next chapter to its most southern reaches: the Essex marshes and the estuary of the Thames.
From these sites of myth, rumour and conspiracy (and sometimes outright oddity – have you heard of the micro-nation of Sealand, established in 1967, of which one Michael Bates is prince?), we travel with Blass to the river Scheldt; to Scarborough, Ostend, Holderness (home of the fastest-disappearing coastline in the world); and on to, among many other places, the “almost islands” of Halligen and the proper islands of Shetland.
It can be an exhausting journey, but Blass’s attentiveness and curiosity are such that you are seldom more than a few pages from encountering an invigorating detail (about the vicissitudes of a given island’s wildlife), an arresting fact (about Henry Kissinger’s influence on the cod war, perhaps; or the first recorded use of the bathing machine), or fantastical coast dwellers and obscure communities. There is also much to savour in Blass’s digressions on the range of languages that pertain to the North Sea, many of which it helped forge and shape … This is an invigorating and atmospheric account of a world that is central to our identity, and it is to Blass’s credit that he keeps its own true nature hovering somewhere only just out of view.
Matthew Adams - Read the full review
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