The Honeymoon Crasher

November 2007 will stand as the month I crashed not one, but two honeymoons. As a follow-up to Sharath and Sorcha’s safari bonanza, I met two lovely fellows from London who had just tied the knot. We hung out at Kendwa Rocks and, until their departure the day before mine, my new friends shielded me from an influx of proposals involving cattle, life planning, and large families. As a result of this meeting, my life has moved one step closer to some kind of completion (or, alternatively, aesthetic entropy). Life experience #492: Part immersion of self in turquoise waters at sunset whilst wearing a loud bikini and large sunglasses and drinking the daggiest drink in the cocktail manual, a pina colada, complete with paper umbrella and redundant fruit slices.
Yeah yeah, I know, enough already with the sunsets. I was directed to Kendwa, a beach village on the north of Zanzibar, by a Zanzibar old-hand, an American lass whose judgment I uncharacteristically decided to trust on the briefest of encounters. I caught a dala dala along bumpy back roads from Stonetown through concrete block villages and wondered whether I’d been lead up the garden path. No, it was stupidly beautiful there, an impossible convergence of turquoise, aquamarine and out further, darker, deeper blues captured in the sea.

I lay on the beach, all white sands and palm-fronded umbrellas and my entire genetic being was confused. I am not configured for idyllic beaches but for fens and moors and crags: I have the pink and beige complexion to prove it. What with the sun and the photosensitivity enhancing medication, I’ve gained a whole set of interesting new freckles which may in the future form some meaningful constellations on my shoulders and hips. No doubt a few cells have started to wonder whether they should start to wriggle and twist in a non-conformist, melanoma type fashion. It was stupidly beautiful back there on Kendwa and I’m beginning to suspect that this kind of environment does in fact make you stupid. I certainly feel a whole lot stupider, like my brain has been poached. Sunsmart and pasty as I should be, I’m veering towards tan-dom, for starters.

Forgive all this blathering. I blame Richard Ford – I read The Lay of the Land on the beach. I should, all things being proper, loathe Ford’s WASPy male menopausal meanderings, in the same way that I should have loved Radclyffe Hall’s femo-sappho-Modernist extravanganza, The Well of Loneliness, which I suffered through last week. Oh gosh, modern life is so hard to understand and all of these changes in the social fabric, they’re tough too, and how, oh how, does one go about being a good citizen, a middle-aged man, a father and a husband, under these conditions? Oh me, oh my, blah blah blah. Three days are stretched into seven hundred pages, every incident a trigger to memory and digression, a more sophisticated version of the Sex and the City school of exposition: ‘and that got me to wondering/thinking/remembering…’ The Lay of the Land got under my skin in the same way that Independence Day did, with its expansive, waffly contemplations anchored by a litany of precise and incessant detail. I think it is the wry and bafflingly unironic narrative voice of the rambling, wondering Frank Bascombe, good man/everyman/sad man/just a man, that prevents the unabashed symbolism and allegorical contortions of the narrative from being as annoying as they really should be. It’s a smart, measured and weirdly affecting novel, one that I couldn’t ever quite bring myself to throw into the ocean. That’s praise, surely. Even though I can’t honestly hate Richard Ford, I do, however, hold him almost entirely responsible for the discursive nature of these last few posts. On the other hand, I have also recently read a couple of space opera sci-fi novels (ah, genre fiction, sweet narcotic) and you will note that there haven’t yet been any alien megaships setting down on the beaches.