What a disappointment. This was just awful. Two boring people cross paths after many years at a school awards ceremony. This stinks of fish. If you start this you will know what I mean but you should waste your time some other way. ( )

When I first read A.S. Byatt's [b:Possession|41219|Possession|A.S. Byatt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1391124124l/41219._SY75_.jpg|2246190] in 2005, I thought the style was stilted and overwrought, a problem that I also had when I shortly after read some of Byatt's other fiction. Over time, that impression softened so that, while some of Byatt's efforts still seem like a failure, overall I have come to a deep appreciation of her work as a whole.

I mention my experiences with Byatt here because Drabble is Byatt's younger sister. The two sisters don't get along, and if you read the fictional portrait in Byatt's [b:The Game|222989|The Game|A.S. Byatt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1459757947l/222989._SY75_.jpg|2199407], it's not hard to see why. The two women don't read each other's work, although in more recent times both authors have played down the feud as mere sibling rivalry.

Nonetheless, with The Sea Lady, the first novel I have read by Drabble, my mind goes back to that first experience with Possession, and I can't help but compare the two writers. As it turns out, Possession was an aberration - I have reread it more recently, and still don't like it - but I have a profound admiration for many of Byatt's other works. In particular, I have gotten a sense of her development as an artist - if you go back to her first novel, [b:The Shadow of the Sun|91520|The Shadow of the Sun|A.S. Byatt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348121140l/91520._SY75_.jpg|2246036], you can see how her style and themes have changed as she has matured.

Because this is my first work by Drabble, I can't make a similar comparison, but I will say this based on my first impression: this novel stinks as much as the awkward fish metaphor that runs throughout the book. I hope other books by her are better, but I don't hold out much hope of that. This style, I fear, is her defining feature.

The story itself revolves around two main characters: Ailsa Kelman, a feminist, actor, and television celebrity, and Prof. Humphrey Clark, a celebrated marine biologist. Each of them is returning to Ornemouth, a place on the northern English coast, to accept an honorary degree from the new university there. As they travel back physically, they also travel back in time, to the childhood when they first met.

Humphrey recalls his first summer by the sea, at his grandmother's house during World War II, when he became friends with Sandy Clegg. Together, the two boys became interested in marine life and set up an aquarium together. They lose touch, until Humphrey returns unexpectedly the next summer. The dynamics have changed, however, because the two boys are joined by the Kelman children, Tommy and Ailsa. Humphrey feels deeply rejected when Tommy and Sandy go off without him, and he is left with Ailsa. There is also a lonely, excluded girl named Heather Robinson, who is mentioned several times but is superfluous to the story. The time by the sea marks Humphrey for life, inspiring his career as a marine biologist.

As the characters travel back in their thoughts, we mainly see through Humphrey's eyes at first: his conventionality, his re-connection with Ailsa when she is starting out as an actress, his encounter with the narcissistic Marcus Pope, their love affair that leads to a brief but damaging marriage, the guilt that Ailsa and Humphrey feel for what they did to each other. We also see Ailsa's rise to fame, and the parallel success of her Machiavellian brother, Tommy.

The disappointing aspect of Drabble's narrative is how forced and inauthentic it feels. There is no sense of losing yourself in the mind of the characters, because Drabble exhausts every nuance by over-explaining it, on top of which she constantly tries to teach her readers about all kinds of irrelevant details, ranging from forgotten historical figures to the mating habits of fish. She compounds this awkwardness by adding the meta-textual character of the Public Orator, a kind of master narrator who is weaving all these stories together. This device adds absolutely nothing to the story: it is pure writerly masturbation.

When Ailsa and Humphrey finally make it to the ceremony, it turns out that the whole thing has been engineered by Sandy, who now goes by the Alistair Macfarlane. Sandy had kept his distance from his friends because - get this - it turns out that he is gay, and didn't want to associate his friends with that social stigma. It turns out that the excursions with Tommy were among his first homosexual experiences.

The biggest problem I had with The Sea Lady was its lumbering, imperious, and ultimately ungainly style. Drabble's prose lacks any kind of discipline. It is full of an unconscious arrogance and lack of awareness that is driven by an overbearing but undeserved sense of self-importance. This stylistic clunkiness, together with the unlikability of the banal characters and utterly pedestrian nature of the plot, made The Sea Lady an excruciatingly difficult novel to finish.

Drabble, it seems, wanted to make some kind of high-minded comparison between fish and the evolution of human behavior, particularly with regard to sexuality. The result is laughable - the homosexuality of Sandy Clegg, and the international make-up of the student population of the university at Ornemouth are mistaken for a more widespread diversification of human culture. Drabble never even considers how condescending this conclusion is, nor how it remains blind to the neo-conservative and racist elements that continue to churn away in British society.

For me, The Sea Lady was a failure in every way. Unlike with Possession, I don't yet see how Drabble's reputation, for me, can be redeemed. Only time, I suppose, will tell. ( )

Excruciatingly boring. Could not get into it for the life of me. I bailed on it. Sad because I really did want to like this book. ☹️ ( )

Possibly helpful geographical note: The setting of this novel maps seamlessly on Berwick-on-Tweed, the northernmost town in England. (Which is to say Finsterness is Berwick, and Ornemouth is Tweedmouth.) Never been there myself, I'm just a compulsive user of Google Maps.

Not sure why I bothered finishing this. It was unimpressive. ( )