Lamorna Ash

How can a little fishing town at the southern tip of England support 306 pages of prose? Well, the prose is elegant, humorous, poetic and often riveting. Lamorna Ash is a young, well-educated London journalist and playwright with family connections to coastal Cornwall. She immerses herself in the fishing industry in the town of Newlyn. As she learns about ocean fishing from small boats, spending days at sea in oilskins and wellies, gutting and sorting fish, gazing wondrously at ocean sunrises and sunsets, she teaches us.

The small crews of men on the several boats she shares become her friends. Almost all come from generations of fishing families. She lovingly portrays their differing personalities and idiosyncrasies, aided often by the pints she shares with them at local pubs after each venture at sea.

Her descriptions of the sea and sky - ever changing - are beautiful. Here is one at dusk:

"All grows quiet and slow. Gently colours sweep across the old empty world, readying it for black night and the renewal it will bring. The sun sinks down and is gone without a final encore. It is a firework display in reverse, every colour and flash and swirl flying back inwards to a single point before disappearing below the horizon. I stay watching the sky until there is one last streak of colour left across it: a pink haze, just as the day began."

The transitions from sea to land are described many times. This is a passage of the crew returning home when cell phone coverage materializes about five miles from shore:

"A myopia descends upon the whole crew simultaneously. Our smiles turn inwards as our home lives open outwards. At once, Kyle and I, who have yarned and prattled together all week, lapse into silence, transfixed by our screens. Our fingers caress the smooth, clean surfaces of our virtual lives and in each of our eyes shines a reflected blue oblong. And, like that, the community of the past eight days fractures."

A captivating book.… (mer)

Lamorna Ash is named for a town in Cornwall, and her childhood is replete with memories of visiting the area during the summer holidays. As an adult, she decides to return to Cornwall to see how it has changed. From her home base in Newlyn, she spends weeks at a time on various fishing vessels, learning first-hand the challenges and joys of working in a field with such long tradition, and seeing how the 20th and 21st centuries have left and continue to leave their mark on these communities.

I really enjoyed this memoir. The descriptions of life on board were well realized, with drama and humour and a certain amount of grossness (fish guts are pretty icky). Ash learns a lot about herself as she undertakes this journey, and about what it takes to survive at the end of the Cornish peninsula.

I would recommend this if you’re attracted to Cornwall and want to read about a way of life that is hanging on in spite of the tourists and the gentrification, if you have family from that part of the world, or if you like to read about life on the sea. I would perhaps not recommend it if you’re vegan, because there is a fair bit of talk about cutting up fish.

This book contains a reading list at the end, in which Ash lists all of the books she quotes from or mentions having read in each chapter. This has naturally added more books to my TBR!… (mer)