The Wine-Dark Sea by Robert Aickman

 

THE WINE-DARK SEA by Robert Aickman

“…the tideless Mediterranean and Aegean, which on a calm day tend to be at once stagnant and a little uncanny. Dense weed often clogs the shallows, uncleaned by ebb and flow;”

England has similar places of tideless, gluey Zenoism, too: e.g. in Ringing the Changes and Letters to the Postman. Here, holidaying on a Greek island with the modern day’s  triviality of radios et al, is an Englishman with curious curiosity  called Grigg — “He felt agog (it was the only word)…” — and, by stealing a boat, visits a smaller island off that mainland island, the smaller one greatly spurned by the mainland locals. It seems to be a living rock with, built-in, a male statue as if Grigg is seeing a naked Mussolini (Cf the the Aickman novel Go Back At Once), a statue that is upon – or part of – this rock,  together with a fortress inhabited by three beguiling  women, Tal, Vin and Lek, who take him over by ‘uttermost rapture’ as well as wine. And with depiction of his striking nightmare while there and a great cyclic earthquake and a later storm and intruder   — and comprising his explorations stealing through empty rooms via doors all of which are either open or shut —  he is himself, via some failure of loyalty towards them, eventually spurned by those three siren women whom everyone else had already spurned. 

And, using words from this story, an author who felt himself  “poisoned with masculinity”, I guess, judging by his canon. A mystically opaque work that is only interesting because it forms a part of — and sheds some oblique light on — that very Aickman canon. (Also a story with possible racially or politically didactic references to Greeks and Turks.)

All my reviews of Aickman: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/