Back then, the sea

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Great Britain around 800, with the kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia

Back then, the sea is the fourth work of the youth author Meg Rosoff , who was born in Boston, Massachusetts (USA) in 1956, studied at Harvard and then briefly worked for an advertising agency in New York before moving to London in 1989. Here she studied sculpture, got married, had a daughter and only began writing in 2003, immediately after her youngest sister died from cancer. Since all of her previous stories are set in England and have been published there, Meg Rosoff is often mistaken for a British writer.

What I Was , the original from Back then, the Sea , was published in 2007, the German version in the translation by Brigitte Jakobeit followed in 2009. The book was nominated for both the “Costa Children's Book Award” and for the “Carnegie Medal” and in Germany awarded the "Lynx of the Year 2009".

The story takes place on the east coast of England in 1962 and tells of the secret friendship between two teenagers: one an unhappy boarding school student, the other an independent hermit who leads an isolated but free life on a sandbar near the school.

content

prolog

The framework of the novel is formed by the memories of an old man who sadly remembers his first love and as a first-person narrator writes the same novel about it: “I am a hundred years old, an impossible age, and my thoughts are not anchored in the present. So they drift along and almost always end up on the same bank. Today, like most other days, is the year 1962. The year in which I discovered love. I'm sixteen again. "

action

Sixteen-year-old Hilary had already been evicted from two schools when he was admitted to St. Oswald boarding school in 1962 , a cold and gloomy Victorian brick building on the mist-shrouded coast of East Anglia . The school seems like a prison to him, life there unbearable. He hates classes, sports, his classmates and teachers. Above all, he hates himself, his too small body, his straw hair, his skeptical eyes, his ugly face, which in his opinion "always looks devious and pretty idiotic" in photos.

One day when he was setting himself apart from the others during a cross-country run, he happened upon Finn, a remarkably good-looking, taciturn peer. After the death of his grandmother, who had raised him very liberally and taught him to read and write, he lived completely alone and withdrawn in a small hut on the beach. Without ever going to school or receiving any other kind of education, he trained himself from books, is well read, lives off fishing and works regularly at the local weekly market. Hilary thinks this is an ideal life. He admires Finn, envies his paradisiacal freedom, visits him more and more from now on and feels fascinated by the quiet boy and attracted in an enigmatic, almost erotic way.

Shortly before Easter, with the help of forged letters to his parents and the school management, he succeeds in ensuring that he can secretly spend the entire Easter holidays with Finn. A partly hard, partly romantic life on the inhospitable coast, whose sea becomes the backdrop and mirror of its longing irritations and emotional roller coaster. He learns to paddle and sail, fish and raise fish traps. You climb and dive, work your fingers sore, freeze and warm yourself up again by the crackling stove fire in the barren fisherman's hut. Hilary, so far without real friends and everywhere only surrounded by cynics, whom he tries to stand up to with gruff sarcasm, is really happy for the first time in his life.

Towards the end of the school year, Finn suddenly becomes very ill and Hilary fears that his friend has been infected with the contagious glandular fever that had spread at boarding school a few weeks earlier. Since Hilary's behavior is now viewed with suspicion by everyone, he has to restrict his visits to the sandbank and can therefore only inadequately care for his patient. But when he discovered one day that Finn's camp was smeared with large stains of blood and excrement, he was so shocked that he ordered an ambulance after all. Finn, completely weakened, wants to flee, but is picked up and taken to the hospital on time.

The friendship between the two can no longer be kept a secret from the public. However, classmates and teachers misunderstand the innocence of this relationship, especially when it turns out, also to Hilary's great surprise, that Finn pretended to be Hilary in the hospital, in fact a girl and only fourteen years old, i.e. two years younger as he. A scandal! Especially since Hilary, in addition to the alleged seduction of minors, is also charged with the death of one of his classmates. Finn's mother is located and the girl is returned to her care. Hilary has to leave school and go back to his parents. The police investigation against him lasts almost two years until it finally turns out that the dead person was a victim of a mere accident and that Hilary is innocent. Hilary breaks away from his parents' house and moves quickly into the abandoned hut , which has since been badly battered by an apocalyptic storm. He repairs it, makes himself comfortable in it, earns his money at the weekly market and does everything Finn used to do before. In this way he gradually realizes his dream of becoming more and more like Finn himself - and finally calling himself that. However, the rising sea level, which has always threatened the sandbar, is putting the beach hut under water more and more often until one day it finally sinks completely into the waters: Hilary's change of identity for the sake of Finn's admiration and solidarity cannot ultimately prevent him from setting the scene her idyll, the symbol of his first great love, which the tides have to give up.

Many years later, Hilary dares to visit Finn a few more times without admitting the truth, of course, of his affection for her. He feels guilty and has been transferring money to her bank account regularly for nearly eighty years because, in order to save her life, he once had to betray her and destroy her happy island life. He, who later can never fall in love with another woman, gets very old, survives Finn and in a final scene throws her ashes into the sea, exactly where their hut once stood.

Minor characters

(The page numbers in the following sections refer to the edition of the novel by Carlsen Verlag listed below.)

The teachers:
The teaching staff consists of “a mixed bunch of cripples and mentally battered existences”, all of them somewhat older men and war veterans, the majority of whom “hardly deserves a mention” (22): the fat little headmaster and religion teacher Mr Beeson Napoleon fan, whose "knowledge of Latin and Greek was hardly better" than that of the pupils; Mr Parkhouse, a fanatical physical education teacher whose training resembles basic military training; the English teacher Thomas Thomas, a tearful idealist and stutterer (as his name suggests), who uses his "long white hands" primarily to use the cane; the French teacher Markel, a Basque resistance fighter who likes to be distracted from the subject in class to talk passionately about "torture and self-sacrifice under the Vichy government"; the boring Mr Brandt, the effeminate Mr Lindsay, the vain Mr Harper wearing a toupee.

Most influential, however, is Mr Barnes, a manic-depressive history teacher who “had a war trauma, a prosthetic buttock and only one eye” and, with his stories of “anarchy and violence” in the Middle Ages, makes a chord in the students sound that everything else pedagogical talk of humanity, idealism and spirit drowned out. (99)
Hilary's "head of the house" Gordon Clifton-Mogg, a boarding school caretaker with far-reaching disciplinary rights, plays another special role and is paternal and caring (47) and demands trust from his students, but in truth controls every step she takes like a suspicious gun dog and only aims to break her will. (147)
Although "proper schooling is a privilege" (103), it does not seem surprising under such conditions that Hilary, like Finn reproachfully states that "remains astonishingly uneducated", especially since he does the other "Zuta" ten "of the boarding school feels worse:" The lousy food, the cold, the boredom, the isolation. The everlasting winters [without heating]. The prospect of all the years ahead of you, in which you are incarcerated behind brick walls, with no hope of rescue. "(86) Hilary's damning résumé:" In my opinion, this school and its contemporaries were nothing but cheap dealers for social status, the sold an inflated sense of self-worth to middle-class boys without special merits. "(13)

The classmates:
Hilary's pubescent classmates, who were usually pushed off to boarding school as annoying troublemakers, are true sadistic monsters: “Like most boys, we were far more interested in blood than in art and culture. We longed for beheadings, brutal quartering, for noses and ears and upper lips that were cut off for minor offenses, for branding, taught with hot irons. We couldn't hear enough of malefactors cooked to death, murderers burned at the stake, gouged eyes, and tongues pierced with nails or cut at the roots. There couldn't be enough rape, pillage, torture, pain, skin disease, molting and stinking purulent plagues to satisfy our bloodthirstiness ”(186). His two roommates Barrett and Gibbon seem dull and listless at first (10), but all facets of "social treachery" (175) are hidden behind them: sanctimonious malice, envious malicious pleasure, extortionate greed for money and, above all, always as an outlet for daily frustration again rampant violence and a destructive communication, with which one tries to outdo oneself in sarcastic insults and obscene allusions and to keep afloat. Reese, the third roommate, is the group's underdog, a weakling who tries to escape his victim role by clinging to Hilary like a burdock and vying for his friendship in vain. He knows about Finn, but does not reveal anything and holds tight until the truth is literally beaten out of him (208). He takes on almost tragic traits when, in order to warn Hilary of the students' revenge, he puts himself in mortal danger and - his last victim role - dies in it. His basically miserable existence is also enhanced by the fact that his penetrating attachment forms a clear parallel to Hilary's behavior, who is just as stubbornly clinging to Finn, to whom such loyalty is also annoying for a long time.

The parents:
The wealthy parents of the upper middle class who send their children to St. Oswald were people “whose marriages were not exactly passionate and whose relationship with their children was inspired by the word 'duty' rather than the word 'love. Sometimes they had a dog in tow, a spaniel, or an apricot-colored poodle that matched the mother's hair ”. They spend their vacation on the Mediterranean Sea, have housekeepers and “a well-controlled emotional life” (212). Hilary's parents are also part of it, a family of lawyers and bankers, the father a bit hypothermic and pessimistic, the mother a bit insecure and overly friendly, who “spoils her son to the core” (66) when he comes home every few months comes. And yet, according to the one-hundred-year-old narrator, they are probably “not entirely unhappy” when they finally get rid of him (209).
You hardly learn anything from Finn's family. Like himself, much remains impenetrable and hidden in the fog of the past. A little bit of scant information about his sixteen year old mother, who screams and leaves the child to the grandmother after three years and presumably moves from the country to the city, that's all Finn can remember (or what he condescends to talk about). When she is finally found after Finn's illness, she is not particularly pleased. She now has a new boyfriend and two more children and goes (perhaps because she has had bad experiences with young men herself) on a confrontation course with Hilary. Finn's father only has a photo of a bearded man with a weathered face, plus a boat and a horse. That's all. His grandmother wants to become a teacher at the age of 18, her father is against it, she runs away, marries and moves to the fisherman's hut after her husband dies, takes Finn with her, teaches him to read, write and do arithmetic and leaves everything else to him chance, the school of life.

St. Oswald, 642 AD

St. Oswald:
Saint Oswald, whose stele with his portrait carved in stone was once found near the school and has since been transported to the British Museum in London, is the patron saint of the boarding school and dives (like so much in this novel) twice Appearance: on the one hand in the 10th century as Archbishop of York and on the other hand in the 7th century as the young king of Northumbria, who brought Christianity to the British, founded an abbey in East Anglia and sought to unite four kingdoms of Britain. Only the second is of interest to Hilary and he makes it the topic of a presentation in class. Because his cruel fate (hacked to death and buried with torn limbs) and especially his youthful appearance fascinate him: the beardless smooth face, the strong profile and "the beautifully curved mouth" (104). Hilary has chosen him to be his guardian angel (“Wache über mich!”, 109) and has probably also found a homoerotic identity figure in him. When, looking for the remains of Oswald's Abbey in the sunken city a few miles up the coast, he suddenly had “a puzzling vision” and “a pale oval with flowing hair, fleeting and bright as the moon” (134 ), it turns out seconds later that it is Finn who “set him up”: another symbol of Finn's mysterious identity and his long successful game of hide-and-seek, which is the highlight of the entire story.

shape

In addition to the change of identity, the novel plays with several motifs that justify its literary claim and go beyond the level of an ordinary youth book. In doing so, he often uses a metaphor that conjures up images of both the sea and history, making the idiosyncratic German title appear legitimate.

  • Typographically highlighted in bold and therefore visually striking from the start, however, are the ten "rules" interspersed by the narrator in his memories, with which Hilary self-ironically comments on his life and his surroundings. He, who hates the rules of the school most of all (86), creates his own reservoir of sometimes quite paradoxical maxims and behavioral patterns, gained in the school of life, that is, in the new way of life, which on the one hand initially based on the example of his adored teacher Finn, but is increasingly characterized by self-conquest and independence: "I forced myself not to be squeamish and followed my own rules while I was still inventing them." (77) - Apparently random and "irregular “Distributed over the 34 chapters of the novel, those ten rules parodistically imitate the rules of school operations, which are perceived as sheer arbitrariness. From the suspicious imperative “Don't trust anyone” (Rule 1) to the skeptical-philosophical sentence “There is no truth” (Rule 10), the content of which is equivalent to a self-repeal of all rules, they reflect Hilary's emancipatory learning steps, remain pessimistic and influence until the end the melancholy keynote of the novel. They form the counterpoint to the hypocritical hypocrisy and false optimism of boarding school education and only end when Finn, deadly ill, fails as a mentor, Hilary finally stands on her own feet and becomes Finn herself: “One would think that it would be one There were rules, but I had run out of rules. "(216)
  • Above all, however, there are, as already indicated, the numerous historical references, especially those on the "dark Middle Ages", the epoch that is not only a school subject, but is also closely interwoven with the novel's plot in the form of various allusions. To find the identity of the boys and to satisfy their hunger for real life it is necessary to literally get to the bottom of things both temporally and spatially and to immerse oneself on the one hand in historical books and on the other hand in the remains of a Roman fort and a medieval city resting on the seabed to dive down. When the history teacher talks about the battles and the cruelty of those times, the students are very enthusiastic. Correspondingly, Finn's extremely primitive and hard life in his beach hut illustrates what everyday life actually looks like under such circumstances.
  • Another important complex of motifs is the repeated (and geologically correct) mention that the English east coast descends more and more to the sea over the centuries, while the “[west] coast of Wales on the other side” rises higher and higher, “what suggests that the whole of England is slowly falling into the sea. [...] I am really looking forward to this slow sinking into nothingness and believe that it will do our country infinitely good. ”Significantly, it is precisely this process, which Hilary still wished for with malicious glee, which he later wants to prevent at all costs , but can't: His little paradise is doomed to inexorable, Finn's hut is also flooded by the water.
  • In the final chapter, which takes place in 2046, that is, the point in time of the narration into the future, the two motifs just mentioned are linked. The protagonist, who has meanwhile grown old, glides slowly in his boat over the once so hated school, which has now been completely swallowed up by the rising sea: “And this is where my story ends. Here while my trusty little skiff carries me over the past. I'm an old man with a mind full of memories, and there's a part of me that always looks back, that swims in reverse, past the twentieth century, past the nineteenth, eighteenth, and seventeenth centuries, constantly flying backwards, back, back and still further back until it slows down and finally stops in the middle of the seventh century, where I live in a shack by the sea and make a living doing fish, cooking stew in a cast iron vessel, collecting wood for my fire on the beach and fish and fight in wars to protect what is mine, even if it is not very much. “- Similar to the time in this endless tapeworm sentence, the present is literally blurred with what was and what will be. Similar to the way in which secret longings and harsh reality alternate with each other in this strange love story, the novel seems to want to liquefy solid ground and all security everywhere "in the gnawing rhythm of ebb and flow".

reception

Like all serious authors, Meg Rosoff cannot do without small borrowings from great world literature. Not only has she carefully read her Daniel Defoe (“Robinson Crusoe”), Charles Dickens (“David Copperfield”), Mark Twain (“Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”) and JD Salinger (“The Catcher in the Rye”) , but obviously also knows the "Tillerman" romance cycle of her colleague and bestselling author Cynthia Voigt , who is also from Boston . Above all, when writing What I Was , she seems to have had Charles Simmons' novel "Salt Water" in mind, which is very similar in terms of both psychology and ambience (which has been relocated to the North American east coast) . Like 15-year-old Michael there, but also like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, like Holden Caulfield, the “Catcher in the Rye”, and the Tillerman kids, Meg Rosoff drives the youngsters like flotsam on the shores of a world in which they are “Are completely thrown on themselves. Adults are marginal figures, with a little luck insignificant, not helpful or even downright contemptible when misfortune takes over. That gives the event a touch of melancholy. Sometimes there is a sharpness that can turn into bitterness, only compensated by the humor, which is sometimes wistfully ironic. The lack of security ensures that the action falls back entirely on the perspective of the young heroes. You have this broad view of the world, unlimited by convention, habit, callousness. You won't be able to delve deeper into the experience of a youthful hero, that alone gives you courage. "

review

Hannes Hintermeier ( FAZ ): “[Meg Rosoff's] heroes are at their most difficult age. When the brain rearranges itself, the child becomes a teenager. When they don't know if they are males or females. Some understand how to communicate without words, can read minds like their English cousins ​​who smoke and drive the jeep. Others speak with their eyes, like the one-year-old brother of fifteen-year-old David. He throws his toys into an umbrella stand, from which he can no longer free them. While the big brother thinks about why small children play such nonsensical games, the one-year-old replies silently but clearly: 'I don't play at all. I'm thinking about falling. ' The intermediate creatures of Meg Rosoff are of this kind. So normal pubescent people, and yet that crucial meter crazy from a reality that adults have become accustomed to believe to be real.
These are officially books for young people. Three of the four extraordinary novels are available in the dry, lyrical tone of the translation by Brigitte Jakobeit by the 'Harry Potter' publishing house Carlsen. But Rosoff is worlds apart from JK Rowling or Stephenie Meyer . Adults who romp around in this segment to be on the safe side, because age-appropriate fiction is too high for them, will learn from her what literature can do if it does not impress with plot and suspense, but with linguistic artistry and dazzling characters. "

literature

Text output

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Her debut novel was How I Live Now (2004), (Eng. This is how I live now ). This was followed by the children's book Meet Wild Boars (2005) and the novel Just in Case (2006), (Eng. What if ).
  2. ^ The CILIP Carnegie Medal & Kate Greenaway Children's Book Awards
  3. ↑ Meg Rosoff: Damals, das Meer , p. 5.
  4. ↑ Meg Rosoff: Damals, das Meer , p. 12.
  5. ↑ The individual rules are: 1. Don't trust anyone (p. 7); 2. Keep yourself covered (p. 12); 3. Not everyone is subject to rules (p. 37); 4. Don't look the other way (p. 78); 5. Never let go of the cliff (p. 96); 6. There are clues everywhere (p. 120); 7. All rumors are true (p. 145); 8. Do not trust anyone - least of all yourself (p. 153); 9. Don't look back (p. 184); 10. There is no truth (p. 199).
  6. ↑ Meg Rosoff: Damals, das Meer , p. 20.
  7. ↑ Meg Rosoff: Damals, das Meer , p. 233.
  8. ↑ a b cf. on this, Susanne Mayer, DIE ZEIT No. 47, November 12, 2009, p. 64.
  9. ^ Youth book author Meg Rosoff: Horse girls come everywhere

Web links