The Storm

Another ocean novel, this one with a tempest, and lots of sea change.

When I was a kid, my sister and brother and I believed that when you were on an island, certain rules no longer applied.  On an island, we decided, people were allowed to swear (a big no-no in our family), come to the table barefoot (likewise) and in general be free of constraint.  We went to an island every summer for a couple weeks (Martha’s Vineyard) and I’m pretty sure my parents did not announce this policy, or even officially support it, but there was something about being on an island, free of the mainland, that changed things and allowed things.  A sea change.

Frederick Buechner’s 1998 novel The Storm takes place on a small island, Plantation Island off Florida’s Atlantic coast, a wealthy community owned and ruled by the eccentric Miss Sickert.  The title is sort of like Chekhov’s gun; you don’t name a novel The Storm unless you plan to bring in a big old storm before we are through.

And since the storm is coming, we assume that the characters will be also be through; the storm, when it finally comes, is a sudden, dramatic destructive force of wind and wave.  Two characters on a fishing trip are surely goners, and the others on shore see their boat capsize and disappear.  But unlike at least two of the ocean novels I have read this summer, Sea Wolf and The Sea Runners, historically based tales of storm and death, Buechner’s storm transforms rather than destroys.  Buechner’s epigraph for the book is a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and like Prospero and that island gang, these characters “suffer a sea change, into something rich and strange.”

Buechner is a Presbyterian minister (now age 92) whose wise and witty theology books I’ve read on and off since seminary, but he is also an award-winning novelist.  The only novel of his I had read before was the Pulitzer Prize finalist Godric, a sweet tale of a 12^th century monk, but I’ve read none of his modern fiction.  Looking for a new ocean novel last week I saw The Storm on the library shelf and knew Buechner’s name.  IE, this week’s ocean fiction choice was a bit random, or one could say, serendipitous.

Serendipitous because the book has both ocean and theology in it – my two favorite things.  And it’s got some autobiography as well, I think.  Like Buechner, who grew up in New York and lived in Bermuda for a while, McKenzie Maxwell is a moderately successful New York writer whom comes to live on this island when at age 69 he marries a wealthy divorcee and enters the very controlled social life of the island.  He brings with him the shame of a past scandalous affair with a teenager and estrangement from his brother.  He is a good but troubled man.  He visits regularly at an old folks’ home on the mainland, but seems otherwise sort of lost.  His impending birthday leads him to ask himself all kinds of questions about forgiveness, what has his life meant, is reconciliation possible with his various odd family members who all seem destined to come together for the birthday.  Also destined is, of course, the storm.

Part of island ecology is that there is no escape from a storm.  Ocean surrounded and cut off, islands are both free (like my childhood land of no rules) but also vulnerable.  The characters in this novel act both ways also; being rich they live lives of golf and cocktail parties, but Miss Sickert’s controlling ownership makes them vulnerable to her rejection and banishment.  And that’s just the owners.  The staff only get the vulnerable part of island life.  The destructive storm levels any privileges and distinctions Miss Sickert thought she could control.  Even she is flooded and left for dead.  Struggling through the dark destruction, she has to seek help from MacKenzie and his family.  And she too suffers a sea change, weeping for a lost life with no heirs and a dream destroyed, but also freed to be more generous and friendly in the future.

A little science here: ecologists like to study islands because there is so much to learn from how and why their ecosystems are so different from mainland communities.  Islands make up nearly 1/6^th of our planet’s land mass, but because they are isolated and have many empty niches (places to find food, safety and to reproduce), island ecosystems are much more specialized.  Islands have 30% of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, 50% of marine tropical diversity and many unusual and rare species.  IE, islands are different and weird and can be instructive as a controlled environment. 

McKenzie thinks he is different and weird, is always wondering if he can forgive himself or be forgiven.  His brother Dalton is no less weird, a controlled law professor who keeps lists of everything.  When his stepson takes him on the ill fated fishing trip, and they are both tossed into the waves, the stepson, assuming Dalton is dead, laments, “Any fool would have known that it was crazy to take him out on the ocean, an indoor person like him, at home only among law books and student’s papers, a man who kept track, wrote everything down in his legible hand.  There was no keeping track of the ocean, he thought, and the waves are illegible.”

But all the characters in this novel actually make it, and are changed, sea changed.  They still contemplate death, which one refers to as “the far shore” and I’m sure they will go back to cocktail parties and golf.  But they have reached a kind of peace and acceptance by novel’s end.  And like the ending of The Tempest, the last scene is all of them sleeping, peaceful and changed. 

A nice peaceful change for this ocean fiction reader as well, less destruction, more transformation.  I’d move to that island.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter