‘Seven Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds’; ‘A Sandhills Ballad’

A drowning man bobs through this unforgettable book, his brief meditations set off in italics. When James Hamilton-Paterson wrote “Seven Tenths” in 1992, he did not intend it as an “environmentalist jeremiad”; nevertheless, he concedes in a preface to this new edition, “the steely attrition of the world’s oceans proceeds at an ever-accelerating pace.” Nor is it a eulogy, though “this mourning for landscape, this apprehension of death without a proper body to grieve over, is one of our modern era’s cruellest legacies. It has often been recorded but seems to have gone largely unremarked as a likely cause of common forms of despair and depression.”

Instead, Hamilton-Paterson brings everything he’s got as a novelist, naturalist and poet to bear in creating a book full of just about every legend, every emotion, every understanding and misunderstanding, every fear and delight, every threshold between the sea and the human being. “Something which became Homo did crawl up a beach many millions of years ago. The satisfaction for certain people of walking back down a beach and into the sea is akin to that of a long-postponed homecoming.”

The author gets around, while showing a refreshing resistance to injecting himself (overtly at any rate) into his observations. Mapping the seabed with the U.S. Geological Survey, describing the naming of formations on the sea floor, remarking on the un-islanding of islands by developers building bridges and chunnels, Hamilton-Paterson gets at the heart of our thinking about the ocean -- inside and outside of us, far away and close, necessary and unknown, mysterious and so familiar. The book is also an odd little museum, with its marginalia on ancient texts, maps and coveted souvenirs: “Often it seems the more that people become urbanised, the more they want about them the talismans of nature on their walls, their shelves, their key- rings.”

Quite often, the author crosses the threshold from fact to fantasy, imagining, for example, the silence of fish (“lest men either patronise them or redouble their torture.”) At least one-tenth of the book is sheer reverie:

“For this is his ocean, and at last he knows he has always seen it thus, towards the end of afternoon: the great white clouds heaping themselves out of nothing against the blue, their tall reflections falling on a glassy sea whose tide lies stilled at low. Reef tops knobble the surface, the kelp and grasses float as rough brown patches among which the white clouds lie in fragments. Children stand a hundred yards out, up to their ankles, legs angular as wading birds, filling coconut shells and tins with winkles. They dabble among the white clouds. Clear voices drift ashore, tatters of a heedless present.”

We never think we’re good enough. Often, we think we deserve the bad that happens to us. It’s a kind of sickness, this self-hatred, and it can swamp a life. In this bleak, familiar novel, Ladette Randolph paints a picture of two decades of a life dedicated to penance. Mary Rasmussen was driving the car that got hit by the truck that killed her young husband and forced doctors to amputate one of her legs.

“She instantly saw herself as she always had in relation to the vastness of the sky: Small, vulnerable, fragile, momentary, free of scrutiny, silent. She was here now and someday she would be gone. Her disability and her new status as widow were not the beginning of feelings of inconsequence. There was a grim comfort in being reminded of what she had always believed was her true place in the scheme of things.”

In the kind, good family of Nebraska ranchers she comes from, there is very little talking done. Mary, subconsciously, devises her own punishment: marry the horrible, self-satisfied preacher with the short teeth and fastidious morals, a man who will surely make her life and the lives of their four children a living hell. He forces them to live in the ramshackle parsonage, insisting that their comfort is of no importance. He denies her every possible pleasure and is the embodiment of the terrifying ability one human can have to ruin another person’s life in a thousand small ways.

Randolph has worked hard to get the Sandhills language right; she clearly has enormous respect for the ranching culture. This creates a kind of density of detail in the novel, sometimes at the expense of transitions (for example, the births of their four children, which happens in a few pages). But this is not grave -- Mary’s focus on detail is, after all, one of the things that keeps her alive. Born with the gift of premonition, she must learn, in spite of the preacher, who tries to substitute faith for kindness, how to trust her own intuition.

susan.reynolds@latimes.com