By Gregory O’Brien
VUP, NZ$30 | Reviewed by Joan Fleming

RENAISSANCE man Gregory O’Brien’s latest book is part travel story and part autobiographical swim. The gorgeously titled News of the Swimmer Reaches Shore is the product of six months spent in the south of France, immersed in art, literature, music, and the Mediterranean.

The free-floating narrative uses the ocean as its central metaphor. It is loosely structured, except for the glue of the Mediterranean and all its attendant allusions. Full of quotes and references, artists and eccentrics, threads of ideas and small lessons on art history, it explores Europe’s artistic and historical preoccupation with the sea. O’Brien makes quirky connections between ideas, events, and the absorbing details of the shore.
There is also humour here. Slightly absurd travelling moments are described with droll articulacy. Quiet meditations on the natural world slow the reader’s pace to a leisurely breaststroke.

A beautifully written introduction prefaces this ‘diving in’, this immersion in country, season, summer and sea-scape. There’s an urgent sense of possessing the moment, and an almost overdone elegy for the time spent, now over: “In French, the month Septembre carries the word ‘tomb’ in its belly.”

Quotes and images are woven together cleverly, but not always seamlessly. The insistence on comparing every detail to the sea becomes tiresome. Minor appearances of everyday objects – teapots, clouds, kites – all have their own stretched marine metaphor. Connections begin to seem forced. Instead of allowing the interesting details to simply exist, we are reminded repeatedly of the aquatic meta-theme.

At times, the narrative dips into a dream-world. Sometimes these glimpses of unreality work well, and at other times they seem overdone and dramatic. Among musings on Le Corbusier, Matisse, and Jacques Cousteau (and, of course, their connections to the sea), a chunk of the book is devoted to Dominique Prieur, the French secret service agent who bombed the Rainbow Warrior. After recognising – shock! – Prieur lounging on a deck chair on the French Riviera, O’Brien describes the umbrella of her cocktail turning into a mushroom cloud.

Other moments seem overdone as well. In translating a scrap of the poetry of Provencal writer Jean Giono, he writes: “These phrases float shoreward on the ocean of English as ‘a village of gold resembles / a vessel afloat / on a wave of stones.” Throughout the book, suitably nautical references are never left to speak for themselves.

Overall, this is an unusual and imaginatively brave piece of writing. O’Brien attempts to insert his imaginative musings into the minds of his non-fictional characters, from famous French architects to skinny-dipping nuns. Personal details about the writer’s epileptic son co-exist with descriptions of solid French cathedrals crumbling and floating away. There is a quality of unreality and magic in the experiences O’Brien relates - a freedom that perhaps comes from his ‘other’ life as a poet and artist.

See also:
» The Book That Got Me Into Books: Gregory O’Brien on A Mammal’s Notebook, and others