Springcleaning – Book 11 “The Naked Shore” by Peter Blass

I enjoy reading books about people’s travel, particularly when the authors do something like following an ancient road or look for different places which share a characteristic. Peter Blass’ book The Naked Shore is about communities and activities in and around the North Sea. I’m British so the North Sea is familiar to me and so are many of the places he visits and writes about. I seem to have acquired this book from my favourite Oxfam bookshop in Holmfirth but I have no idea how long I have had it, which is, of course, the point of my current challenge to read those books that have lingered on my to-be-read pile and never seem to make it to the top.

I had expected the book’s structure to travel around the edge of the sea picking out various places to write about but the arrangement of the chapters seems quite random. We move across the sea and then up and down in it and the areas between the locations which are discussed, and it’s quite a substantial chunk of several countries, are not mentioned at all. There is a map but curiously some of the locations which are discussed in depth are not identified on it. I would have liked a better map and maybe a few photographs or illustrations.

The author talks about seaside towns which are no longer popular, an artists’ colony that has become a tourist attraction, the demise of fishing and the traditions that come with it, land that has been reclaimed from the sea, the oil boom and its effects, and some very small islands with unique cultures. It seems like an ad hoc selection of subjects and locations and the vicinity of the sea appears to be all that they have in common. The author writes in an interesting fashion, although we learn very little about him or what he feels about the places he visits. The things which most of the locations seem to have in common is that they are not thriving and that their prosperity is in the past. After a while it became a bit depressing to read about.

I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I had wanted to, although some of it was interesting and I learned some things. I found its arrangement and choice of subject matter to be a bit bemusing and I don’t think that the various chapters were linked by any analysis of the North Sea and the area as a whole. I didn’t hate this book but I shall not reread it and so I shall return it to Oxfam in the hope that the next reader will enjoy it more than I did.