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Reflections on a Summer Sea by Trevor Norton
Reflections on a Summer Sea by Trevor Norton
What a pity. The first few pages of this elegy to marine biologists working and diving in an Irish backwater some 40 years ago are so beautifully written, you settle into the cushions for what promises to be a pleasurable experience. Sadly, it doesn't last.
Trevor Norton received many plaudits a couple of years ago for his first diving history book, Stars Beneath The Seas. A marine biology professor at the University of Liverpool, he was dubbed, rather recklessly, 'Bill Bryson underwater'.
Now, in Reflections On A Summer Sea, he looks back nostalgically to his formative years as a budding biologist, assigned to study a particular water-plant on summer field trips to a private research facility beside Lough Ine.
The trouble is, unless Trevor Norton has a photographic memory or made verbatim notes of everything his colleagues said at the time, what he has done is to reconstruct their 'reminiscences and tall tales', chock-full of Irish whimsy, and then place them awkwardly back into their mouths.
The book is full of quaint stories told in direct speech, but nobody speaks like that, or ever did, even back in the mid-20th century. Whatever interesting material there is soon gets lost in monologues too indigestible even for the most patient reader.
My only thought was that if I ever got stuck in a research facility having to listen to the endless reminiscences of those 'two eccentric ecologists, the vivacious Jack and the placid John', I'd be out of there on the next available pony and trap.
Steve Weinman
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Reflections on a Summer Sea by Trevor Norton (Century, 020 7840 8400). Hardback, 308pp, £12.99
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