The Schoonermaster's Dance by Alan Gould

The Schoonermaster's Dance Reviews

• 
  Velvetink

  "There is properly no history, only biography" - Emerson.
  
  Really enjoyed this book, could relate to Sarah's enthusiasm & passion for history. There's a lot in this story that will appeal to Maritime devotees and those into shipping history from the late 1800's to the 1940's. Interesting stuff on how she traced her great uncle's seafaring days.
  
  Interesting how the past and one's ancestors' multitudinous lives get inside your bones. Sarah asks "Does the past affect you in a similar way?" For her "it's the sensation of being somehow....hived with former lives. It's a power." She elaborates her interest thus.... "Can I confine my purpose with great uncle to a biography at all? Yes, if it begins and ends with simply wanting to to capture a person's life story. But my impulse towards bygone matters is altogether more peculiar when I examine it closely. I think it is to do with wanting to "inhabit" more of time than has been given to me, to inhabit Uncle's time as intimately as the moments of my own time. Perhaps everyone hankers after this "identification" with what has gone before."
  
  I don't think I've come across anyone before stating those same feelings (that I have about history, and one's ancestors and the need to "know"), and is why Sarah's story resonates with me.
  
  She does follow her research that leads all over the world ending somewhere unknown in South America. Her friends & family though take an uninterested and dim view of it all, especially her best friend Jennifer who sees it as unhealthy and not connected to the "real". It is Jennifer's fears that come to bear in the end....and where the writer takes a turn down that mystical twist road again, rather than writing a satisfactory ending. I'm sure there's a place for mystical twists but I didn't think it required one here.
  
  
• 
  Lisa

  Keen to support both authors and bookshops, I've just bought Chris Flynn's Mammoth and Robbie Arnott's The Rain Heron, which caused a minor crisis on the A-G Australian authors section of the TBR. No room. I was sorely tempted to read one or other of them right away, but The Schoonermaster's Dance waved at me, reminding me that I'd shelved it back in 2013 after a successful hunt for Alan Gould's backlist after I discovered
  The Seaglass Spiral.
  
  So here we are, and what an absorbing book it is, offering much to think about besides the obvious theme of obsession.
  
  Forty-something Sarah Tilber is friends with Jenn, and has been since their schooldays in England. The story of how Sarah's obsession with her ancestor Charles Harling Tilber gets out of hand is narrated by Jenn... who learns most of it through Sarah's letters and postcards and the occasional visit. Jenn is the wife of a schoolmaster in England, and Sarah is the wife of a librarian in Canberra.
  
  Or was. The story begins with Sarah's mystifying disappearance. Her father's death severed her sense of connection to things, and so she left her job at the NLA (where she was a librarian too); she left Kieran, her kindly but claustrophobia-inducing husband; and she set off on a lengthy odyssey to find the traces of this long-dead great-uncle. And somehow, with the circumstances unknown, she disappears in July 1990, somewhere between the border of Peru and Chile.
  
  Jenn, who mourns her still, tells Sarah's story to ensure that her friend has a presence in this world. Sarah had no children (and seemed not to like them much either) and nothing remains of her possessionless life except—like her ancestor—in the traces of other people's lives. So in the same way that Sarah was wholly absorbed in 'establishing' the fact of Charlie Tilber's life, so too is Jenn, using the same word 'establish' to assert the importance of her narration of Sarah's life. Despite her misgivings about her friend's absorption in the past life of an ordinary person, Jenn has taken on the same behaviour.
  
  CHT (as Sarah often abbreviates him) was a man who spent his life at sea, and died alone in an aged care home. But by a series of lucky events, Sarah meets a man who served on the same ship as a boy, and this creates a sense of connection to the great days of sail. A newspaper clipping about a tragic voyage exists, and Sarah uses this to imagine reasons for the haunting that seemed to have been part of CHT's melancholy persona. The tragedy also enables Sarah to invest her great-uncle with a kind of tragic hero status.
  
  Jenn, describing this situation, notes that her friend is detached from the present and the real people in her life (not just Kieran the hang-dog husband but also an uncle, a sister and some nephews in England). The way that she seems wholly absorbed by the past becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the obsessive amateur sleuthing that goes on among many family historians.
  
  To read the rest of my review please visit
  https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/06/06/t...