Cornish Fishermen and Arrabbiata Sauce

Dark, Salt, Clear by Lamorna Ash

White Fishing Boats by Maja Djokic Mihajlovic.

In Dark, Salt, Clear, Lamorna Ash recounts her time among the fishermen in the small town of Newlyn, Cornwall. Her book is equal parts literature, anthropology, and memoir. Between her lush descriptions of fishing and life in the small town, we see her own journey of self-discovery: in Newlyn, among the brotherly fishermen, she discovers something that is missing from the big city, "a tangible, tactile rhythm, the tides, the patterns of life there that continue to echo through your own body long after you’ve left.” (179).

Yet Ash’s strengths - her lush prose and literary erudition - are also her weaknesses. Her sentences are packed with metaphor and literary allusion, but these often get in the way of what she's describing. For example, opening a chapter about a difficult day she had on the sea, she punctuates the greyness of the sky with a quote from a play by Georg Buchner and the explanation of a Cornish dialect word wisht, which apparently means pale or ugly. (157). By the time you’ve waded through this, you forget what she’s even talking about.

At other times her writing is too contrived and falls short of the intended effect; when she describes how living in Newlyn has made her think more about her relation to London, she writes: “On my return, I want to say more about my own place, to describe what it means to me to live somewhere filled with people from across the world, how miraculous it is that we all take the same tube together each day and breathe the same polluted air.” (173). Platitudes aside, there's nothing inherently miraculous about that.

My favourite example is when she recounts first gutting a stingray. The lips so resemble a human's that she is stunned: “Open and shut, open and shut, its mouth sounds out a wordless plea.” The music of these words sets a solemn tone that is immediately broken when she stabs the ray in the heart, “causing a thin trail of arrabbiata-sauce-coloured blood to seep from the wound." She concludes that "there is something deliberate and definitive about stabbing a fish in the heart." (256). I had to put the book down from laughing so hard; what a mistake to mix-in delicious arrabbiata sauce with the stingray's tragic plea.

While Ash does describe the struggles and tragedies of the fishermen and their very difficult lifestyle, she romanticises them and in doing so rewrites and obscures their stories. And their stories are the most interesting thing about this book, the weaknesses of which are summed up beautifully in a story wherein Ash, hanging around the pub, tries to come up with a phrase that encapsulates what fishermen are. Sea-sculpted is her attempt, to which a fisherman replies “Bollocks! That’s not it at all! Stop trying to romanticise us, all right?”, before giving his own attempt: “We’re careworn.” (135-6). Ash’s contrived literary construction juxtaposes with the fisherman’s effortless lyricism. This juxtaposition perfectly describes the book, which veers quite wildly between homely folk-stories and utter pablum.

But ultimately, this book is hard to dislike. Dark, Salt, Clear has a good message, and despite all her romanticising and intellectualising, Ash conveys a love of home and place that's at risk of disappearing completely. This is the main thrust of the book, and it’s hard to reject: “Over time I come to accept it is because the relationship between people and place in Cornwall is different to that in cities. In some ways the two are indistinguishable here: people are place. They grow out of the land and sea…” (179).