Submergence (2011) is set in 2008-2009 in Kismayo in Somalia, and in the Greenland Sea in the Arctic Ocean, with flashbacks to the coast of France.
James More meets Danielle (Danny) Flinders on the beach where they are both staying in the boutique seaside Atlantic Hotel on the coast of France. They instantly, and intensely, become lovers.
Englishman James, a descendent of Thomas More, the author of Utopia (1516), is posing as a water engineering consultant, in France on vacation from his assignment in Africa. Australian-French Danny, a descendant of British explorer Matthew Flinders who circumnavigated Australia in 1802-1803, is a senior scientist and biomathematician, working in the field of oceanography. As James thinks, she is smart enough to figure out who he really is.
In the present time – when they return to work – James is confined in a room in Kismayo, Somalia, kidnapped and detained by jihadists. At the same time, Danny is confined to a deep sea submersible in the Greenland Sea for scientific research. ‘There will never be a Neil Armstrong moment’ in ocean exploration – so she is not doing this for fame or fortune. She is in submergence for essential research where people have not been before. As Roman poet Horace said, ‘Plunge it in deep water: it comes up more beautiful.’
In their confines, both James and Danielle think of life, love, comfort, threat, work, and freedom. His mind turns to sex and utopia; her mind turns to exploration and scientific origins. Space exploration is outwards, but ocean exploration is inwards – and this novel is about introspection: the thoughts of an individual when they are totally alone.
This is a fragmented, structured semi-stream-of-consciousness, brooding, pretentious, over-thought form of writing. The stream-of-consciousness is from the author’s point of view – not the characters’ point of view. The characters remain soulless and uni-dimensional, despite the focus throughout the novel on the two of them (with the exception of James’s captors and Danny’s science crew).
For me, Submergence is an eerie book, and quite prescient – a novel of divine omniscience. This book pre-dates the September 2013 Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi, yet it is alluded to in the novel.
This book also predates the growing interest in deep dive explorations, such as the photographs of organisms from the southern deep dive shown in the current exhibition,Ocean: Une Plongee Insolite, from from 3 April 2019 to 5 January 2020 at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. Or the March 2019 Sky News Deep Ocean Live special, in which the British news service made history with live broadcasts from the depths of the Indian Ocean. Two Sky News reporters (Mark Austin and Anna Botting) broadcast live from a submersible with the British-led Nekton Project at Aldabra near the Seychelles during the mission called The First Descent. The news crew travelled in the Ocean Zephyr submersible vessel to 300 metres (984 feet) – the first submersible to descend that far down.
In addition, Sky News has a Science Correspondent called Thomas Moore, who wrote about his Austin and Botting’s underwater news broadcast. Different spelling but the same name as Ledgard’s main character’s descendant in Submergence, and the author of Utopia. Too prescient; too spooky.
Both Submergence and Ledgard’s first book Giraffe (2006) are thoroughly researched, but I greatly prefer Giraffe, reading it after a conversation with the author in Nairobi, Kenya. I have read Giraffe several times. Its writing is crisper, neater, sparser, and the topic is fascinating. It was always going to be difficult for the author to repeat its brilliance.
MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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